It was basketball that brought Joe Hall to Curry College in the late 1980's as a transfer student from a junior college in Springfield, MA. Through some basketball contacts and head coach Bryan Buckley, Joe found himself on the Curry campus and knew this was the place for him. Joe made the most of it, playing basketball, studying and expanding his horizons as only a small liberal arts college can do.

You might say basketball has been at the heart of much of Joe's success. He spent a great deal of his teenage years playing basketball at the local community center.  Joe witnessed first-hand the positive influence the right kind of experience can have on youths.  It was then he decided wanted to run a community center to give other kids the kind of direction and motivation.  It was this desire to have a positive impact on his community that has been the driving force behind his success. 

While at Curry, Joe almost took exclusively liberal arts classes; he already had most of the business units done and used it as an opportunity to change the way he thought.  He credits an Old Testament class with Professor Russell Pageant, sociology courses with Alta MacDonald, and a sex and gender class with Professors Marlene Samuelson and Ann Levin as being milestones in his development. 

A dual minor in Sociology and Women's Studies exposed him to a different viewpoint, hearing women speak in a way he wouldn't have otherwise.  As he puts it, "An X in a room of O's".  As the head of a non-profit that serves minority students in the South Bronx, Joe uses that experience and training to listen to people and understand them despite their differences.

After Curry College, Joe attended graduate school at Columbia University in New York City where he earned a dual master's degree in public administration and social work.  His practicum work included working three days a week in a Bronx community center.  In his second year, he worked at the Bronx Borough President's Office and learned the political landscape as well as making valuable connections in city government.  After graduation, Joe took a job with a local settlement house where he gained valuable experience writing grants. From there, Joe moved on to a community development organization specializing in low income housing.  By the age of 27 he was overseeing a department of 150 employees.

Joe received a foundation fellowship that placed community leaders into different fields. He chose film studies and was off to the University of Southern California.  At USC, Joe realized two things - that he liked watching movies more than making them and that there was a real racial and economic disparity in the makeup of the students.  The dean of the school explained the expense of film making shut many out of the process, like the people back in Joe's South Bronx neighborhood.

Joe returned to the Bronx in the summer of 2000 with two friends from film school, one of whom was the son of a successful producer.  Parlaying his varied experience, Joe consulted for a few years, taking summers  to begin a new co-curricular program, The Ghetto Film School.  The name was deliberately co-opted from a negative term chosen to grab attention, be provocative and empower the students.  Beginning as a summer program GFS started getting small grants and attracting attention from major industry players. 

Director David O. Russell (I      Huckabees, Three Kings) began introducing Joe to some influential people and helped take GFS where it is today.  GFS is now a year-round program with a Board of Directors and Board of Advisors that includes Mr. Russell, actor Mark Wahlberg, directors Spike Jonze and Jim Jarmusch, Evan Shapiro (IFC Channel) and many others.

Since 2000, GFS has provided production courses, career development and college preparation to 400 aspiring filmmakers, hosting an annual public screening of student work at Lincoln Center, and GFS student films appeared in over 20 festivals last year.  After an intense summer course students return during the year to learn the business.  They travel abroad as a group to work on a Thesis Project; past locations have included Paris, Mexico City and Germany.  GFS has also created a student run company called Digital Bodega that creates commissioned projects for clients that have included the NYC Department of Education, New York Presbyterian Hospital, the German Consulate General and others.  Through this venture GFS students are able to learn more, gain experience in all aspects of the business side of filmmaking, and make money.

In 2009 GFS will open The Cinema School, a specialized NYC public high school for film studies and advanced digital media production.  Joe has brought together key filmmakers, industry executives, government and academic leaders to a planning committee that will create the first state-of-the-art film school in the nation.  The Cinema School will join the elite ranks of 8 other NYC specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and LaGuardia HS for the Performing Arts.   Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration is fully behind Joe and GFS in the planning and creation of the school, with GFS recently receiving a substantial planning grant from the Mayor himself for the initiative.

The work of the Ghetto Film School has been featured in the New York Times, Variety, The Huffington Post, The New York Observer and others.  For more information on the Ghetto Film School visit www.ghettofilm.org