
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.