GPC Professional Profile: Nikita Howard, MediaSpot lab supervisor

“We’re kind of like a hive mind, if someone has a problem we know who’s good in that area and we send them over to help the student,” Drew Hudson says, describing the specialization present in Georgia Perimeter College’s MediaSpot, a media lab where students can use state of the art media software and check out cameras and other equipment essential to creating multimedia projects.

In the hive mind that is the MediaSpot, Nikita Howard is the queen bee, Hudson says. Howard is the MediaSpot’s media lab supervisor and she runs the lab with a kind but firm, sometimes even stern, hand, according to fellow employees and students. “As a supervisor she’s great when she needs to be,” audio specialist Brian Johnson says, adding that it’s not always her being the boss, that she’s one of them.

Nikita Howard, Brian Johnson and Drew Hudson working at the Clarkston MediaSpot
photo by Adam J. Waldorf

Howard is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, where she actually worked in a similar situation to her current job in a computer lab. Her degree is in journalism, so her specialization in editing software and film isn’t an intuitive connection.

She took a circuitous route to film and video production. In high school, she studied law. She was diverted from a possible career in law when she became enamored of the boy bands of the late 1990s, specifically ‘N Sync, the band that spawned superstar singer/actor Justin Timberlake. She started a newsletter about boy bands and decided to major in journalism.

While at Clark Atlanta, the film club there contacted her to help them put out a newsletter. The newsletter never happened, but Howard threw herself into the film club. “There’s only a select few people. There are people that come and do the program and there are people that come and DO the work. So once you get involved with it, it was writing, it was photography. I was in charge of the film club and I said we’ve gotta shoot something. We had gone maybe two months into the semester and people were asking what are you guys doing anyway. I said we need to write something and we need to do it. And that was my first short.” She aggressively pursued filmmaking, ‘I found myself as the president with no shooting background. All the other members were film majors or TV majors, I was a journalism major. I said, “Oh, crap, I’m going to have to learn how to do this.” I started really conversing with my teachers and my mentor is the guy that ran the computer lab.”

Professionally, Howard has done independent work. “I worked at Apple for a little while and that enabled me to get more technical and get the programs for cheap, which is fun.” The equipment enabled her to work making commercials for car dealerships on an international and local basis. She notes her work could be seen in Canada or West Virginia among other places.

Howard sees a return to making film shorts in the near future, but she loves her job and wants to continue. “The coolest thing about my job is seeing someone come in and they have an interest or they don’t have an interest and watching them develop,” she says. “We’ve been open for over a year now and we’re starting to get people who are coming in and doing stuff and showing us their work. Or they started with a class project and they actually were interested in the software so they come back and do it for another class. It’s good to see people using the resources at their disposal and getting professional feedback.”