Michael Banks
Full-time Faculty

Department: Communication Arts
School: NYIT
Campus: Manhattan

Member of NYIT Since: n/a

Dr. Banks was appointed a fulltime member of the NYIT faculty in 1982. He served for many years as an Associate Professor, with tenure, and was later elevated to the rank of Full Professor. For all these years he has proudly called Manhattan his home campus. Before working at NYIT, Dr. Banks was an Assistant Professor in the State University of New York system for three years, after five years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He also taught summer school at Northwestern University, where he earned both his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in 1968 and 1975, respectively.

A life-long professional university educator, Dr. Banks has also held administrative positions. Most recently he served as Chairman and Graduate Director of Communication Arts-Manhattan at NYIT, where he initiated the successful Media Management Masters degree specialization he had first proposed twenty years earlier. He has served on the Faculty Senates, for multiple terms, at each of the universities which employed him. He served his union, AAUP-NYIT-Manhattan as an officer for one term. He has the unique distinction among NYIT Communication Arts faculty of having served as either Advisor or Principle Reader on seven Doctoral Committees (University of Missouri). He was a Reader for all Masters Theses produced at CA-Manhattan for 25 years.

Outside the university Dr. Banks has been a media consultant to many corporate, broadcast and broadband clients. These clients include CBS-TV, Paramount Films, Signode Corporation, Standard Oil of Indiana, Coca-Cola Corporation, AT&T, NBC-Dateline (KNBC-LA), Hill & Knowlton Inc., and, most recently, MTV-Networks and UNICEF. For seven years he worked as the “outside judge” for submissions to the Emmy Awards from WCBS-News, New York. He has produced and owned over forty documentary film and television programs over the past 36 years. Most recently he served as Supervising Producer on the 9 part series "Literary Living" for the Black Family Channel and is presently working as Executive Producer on a series titled "Media Management Conversations" for the Paley Centers (Museum of Broadcasting) in New York and Los Angeles.

He has written, produced and worked as Director of Photography on over 50 television and radio commercials during the same time period. He has deli vered scholarly papers at university sponsored conferences both in the United States and abroad. He has addressed many national and international organizations, most recently as the featured speaker at both the Jacob Burns film Center in Westchester and inside the United Nations, before a delegation of Romanian delegates and dignitaries. Dr. Banks has been active in community work during his tenure at Communication Arts-Manhattan. He was Associate Producer of two, large-scale, New York City Police Disaster Training videos, involving over 50 local, state and federal agencies. He produced four national television spot advertisements for the Department of the Interior (US Census).

For seven years he served on the elected Board of Trustees (two years as vice-chairman) of the Thomas Edison Museum and Tower at Menlo Park, New Jersey. He evaluated another university’s communication program for Middle States certification. A recipient of one of the first Northwestern University RTVF Alumni Awards, Dr. Banks also received the “Vision Award” from NYIT students for “Outstanding Service and Dedication” as well as the Dean’s Service Award in 2001. He also was honored with Citations from the Mayor of New York City and two Police Commissioners. For the past 9 years he has been a Patron of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA and for 7 years a member of the Northwestern University Entertainment alliance-East. For the past eight years Dr. Banks has spent part of each summer in rural Tuscany, where he plants and maintains his own orchard.