Sean Donnelly has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in engineering from Syracuse University, and has worked as an engineer since 1988. Sean studied video production while in high school, and returned to it with a passion in 1998 when he joined the Rochester salon for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (now called Rochester Film Lab). He helped co-chair the salon from 2003-2004.

In 2002 Sean collaborated with screenwriter and director Liz Lehmann on a feature length screenplay ("The End of the World Cafe"), and later teamed with Liz and other filmmakers to shoot and edit a string of improvised guerilla film shorts affectionately labeled "LoFilms" (including "Downsizing", "Reading Marcus", and "Interview Fundamentals for the New Global Economy", which screened in the Little Theatre’s Emerging Filmmakers Series). In 2004 Sean teamed with stage director Anthony Griswold to write and shoot the short comedy "Bird Hunters" (which also screened at the Little in 2006). He shot and edited an adaptation of the director’s off-Broadway play "A Voice from the Lantern" in 2007.

Personal note:

“After I saw An Inconvenient Truth I decided to go green. I signed up for electric wind power from my power company, switched to reusable grocery bags, and bought some compact fluorescents to replace our tungsten light bulbs. But the bulbs didn’t fit many of our fixtures, and the color made my wife nauseated. I couldn’t install a super-efficient ground-source heat pump because I live in an apartment, and although I would have loved to buy the new Honda Civic Hybrid, my current car won’t need replacing for many years. I fully accepted the seriousness of global warming, and yet my motivation for change had run its course in a few weeks resulting in only minor changes. I suspected that far greater changes would be required… but how much greater? It frustrated me that my life seemed to be set up so that individually there was little I could do to address the ‘climate crisis.’ I wondered how many other people were in exactly the same position. How much more could we do, should we do? If the problem was so serious, how come nothing much was being done?