Raymond Ferris Abelin is a writer, director, producer and educator, sponsored into the Directors Guild of America by Richard Donner. Initially awarded degrees in production and professional writing from both UCLA and USC film schools, he also attended Hawthorne, Beverly Vista and Beverly Hills High School, growing up in a region and global industry that has undergone radical change. He was eventually compelled to address new digital media technologies at Harvard, the MIT Media Lab and Colorado, and the business of evolving digital media industries at Queens' College, Emmanuel College and the Judge Business School, Cambridge University. (In 1999 and over a period of 4-years, Abelin was the only person in the University of Colorado system selected by the US Fulbright committee for study in the UK.)
Regarding the Guild, in 1987 the President of the DGA, later President the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Arthur Hiller, asked Raymond Ferris Abelin to serve on the first DGA Creative Rights Negotiating Committee. Following meetings with the heads of the major Hollywood studios, this committee was integral to quickly resolving the only strike in the DGA's history. Members of the committee then led the way to landmark congressional legislation addressing creative rights. (With members of his family, between 1985 and 1990 they also obtained 38 state proclamations towards the advancement of US Presidents Day.)
Prevailing attributes of business tend to control creative decision-making, despite increased access to the evolving technologies used in production. Raymond Ferris Abelin's comprehensive experience mirrors our expanding industry, which is connecting the arts, sciences, business, education and, of course, entertainment. He continues to champion individual creativity, which fundamentally defines the entrepreneurial business and technological innovation characteristics associated with new, wide-ranging creative enterprises, from small to large project and product development. While he was developing ground-breaking entrepreneurship and technological programs in Singapore, the Kauffman Foundation selected the center he was administering as the first Kauffman Campus outside of the United States.
Abelin is the founder of New Media, LLC, producing and directing Innovation and the Fate of Nations, a "digital cinema" documentary with Charles Hampden-Turner, which included the views of other thought leaders in industry, including Lord John Eatwell, Clayton Christensen, Teresa Amabile and Howard Stevenson. In collaboration with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, Dame Veronica Anne Courtice, DBE LVO, and the Open University, Europe's foremost distance learning institution, he developed the mediated learning model for Cambridge's first distance learning initiative, Learning in the Connected Economy. Raymond Ferris Abelin's direction is towards original thinking, creative expression and conscientious business practices that foster an individual's intellectual property, enabling the consequential stories that need to be told, through the harnessing of new technologies that offer collective value, the common good.