Mark J. Marquisee

Mark  and former partner Jerry Millstein started Arden Films, Inc. more than  40 years ago. Mark’s contribution was a 16 mm film camera, purchased  with a portion of an award presented to his doctoral advisor, Dr. Robert  Holly, who received the 1968 Nobel Prize for decoding the structure of  the alanine transfer RNA.

Jerry,  a musician as well as a physicist, bought a professional audio recorder  and the two began to make films when they weren’t working at the DuPont  Company. Eventually, they left DuPont, and for a time, both worked at  Arden Films. In 1976 Jerry left to pursue other interests (music, computer programming) and Mark’s wife, Georgi, joined the company.

Over  the years, with Mark as principal camera operator, Arden Films (now  Arden Media LLC) has served a wide variety of corporate and non-profit  clients, garnering dozens of national and international awards.

Mark  shot and produced numerous globally-themed segments for Sesame Street,  one of the world’s best-known and loved children’s programs. Brilliantly  creative and endlessly curious, he produced a series of shorts  featuring artists and their work, and numerous films and videos  involving his many varied interests, such as horse shoe crabs and  pebbles, Di Modica’s ‘Charging Bull’ sculptures in New York City and  China, and inequitable sentencing in US courts.

He  served on the boards of the Regional Center for Women in the Arts, and  was active in People to People Delaware and Delaware Independent  Filmmakers.

Until  contracting Alzheimers, Mark was co-producer and videographer for  “Families of the World,” a widely acclaimed educational documentary  series for children, as seen on PBS and distributed to schools and  libraries in the US and abroad.

During  his 11 years in the Central Research Department of DuPont, where he  earned several patents, Mark worked on a cancer therapy approach he  conceived, which uses a ‘silver bullet’ to deliver a masked toxin to  tumor sites, where the toxin is then released to kill the tumor.

Mark  obtained his BF degree at New York State College of Environmental  Science and Forestry at Syracuse and his BS in biochemistry from  Syracuse University. He earned his PhD from Cornell University.