Howard B. Zieff Endowed Scholarship
Alumni Scholarship
The Howard B. Zieff Endowed Scholarship was established in 2004 by Howard Zieff (BFA 50 Photography) to provide financial support to undergraduate photography students who demonstrate need and talent.
For Zieff, the years spent at Art Center paved the way for his career success. “I couldn’t afford to go to Art Center,” he says. “It was the G.I. Bill that enabled me to attend. It’s my hope that this scholarship fund will be a ‘G.I. Bill’ for students who have the desire and the talent to be at Art Center, but not the financial means.”
A longtime supporter of the College and donor to the Annual Fund since 1970, Zieff, who passed away in 2009, enjoyed peer and critical success across three major communication genres: still photography, commercial directing, and feature film directing.
In the 1960s Zieff pioneered what is considered standard fare today when he turned the television commercial into an opportunity for short-filmmaking. As a commercial director, Zieff worked with prominent ad agencies such as Wells Rich Greene and Doyle Dane Bernbach (now part of DOB Worldwide).
He brought a welcome sense of diversity to campaigns for Revlon, Volkswagen, Mobil, and Levy’s Rye Bread. The latter featured a Chinese man, an African-American youth, and a Native-American man with the caption: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye.” In a 2002 New York Times interview, Zieff spoke about the impact of the Levy’s ads on his career: “Was it considered daring? Maybe. Everyone was blond and perfectly proportioned. I didn’t want that.” He recalled that subjects in the first photo shoots were failures. “They weren’t the kinds of faces that gathered you up …. That’s what I wanted, faces that gathered you up.”
Zieffs commercial directing garnered him the title of “Master of the Mini Hah-hah” from Time magazine. In 1999, when TV Guide saluted “The so GreatestTV Commercials of All Time,” Zieff had directed five out of the so, including the number three ranked “Volkswagen Funeral” and the number-two ranked Alka-Seltzer “Spicy Meatball” ad.
Zieff returned to his hometown to become a successful feature film director for hit projects such as Hearts of the West (1975), House Calls (1978), Private Benjamin (1980)-which the American Film Institute voted one of the 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time in 2000-The Dream Team (1989), and My Girl (1991).
Zieff grew up in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. He studied art at Los Angeles City College and through the Navy at the Naval Photography School in Pensacola, Florida before coming to Art Center in the late 1940s.