Looking through Julie Wyman's lens, you wonder how Olympic medalist Cheryl Haworth — at 5-foot-9 and 300 pounds — is one of the world's premier athletes.

And then you realize that the weight is to her advantage.

Hold it. Fat is unhealthy. Fat is supposed to be bad. How can this be?

Wyman is hoping for just that reaction when people see her new documentary sometime next year. As an artist devoted to new insights into the human condition, Wyman is using video to change how people think about body weight and health.

Since she arrived on campus three years ago to work as an assistant professor in the Technocultural Studies Program, Wyman also has been teaching video and sound production, thus developing "new literacies" for students who will need more than the mastery of books and statistical analysis to negotiate a media-saturated world.

"As a knowledgeable young person going out into this culture, it is important to express oneself in writing, but also with other modes of communication, as well — Web, sound and video, graphic design," said Wyman, who had taught previosuly at the University of Hartford. Mastering these new literacies "means being able to utilize and communicate with some of the tools, but it also means knowing how to read them."

A Bay Area resident since childhood, Wyman holds an MFA from UC San Diego, and has created a number of documentaries, including A Boy Named Sue, which was shown on Showtime and has won a number of national awards.

She recently sat down with Dateline for an article on making art, teaching and being at UC Davis:

Why are you at UC Davis?

This is a very exciting place to be. I'm in a research university and among colleagues who are thinking about location, politics, gender and technology, and making interesting connections between these areas.

I could say also I am at UC Davis because of Techno-cultural Studies. This is an interdisciplinary program whose emphasis is on looking at connections between things: the connection between technology or science and culture, and the way that inventions, knowledge and gadgets actually shape our everyday life.

It is also good to be here because I am close to the Bay Area, which is the center of the Health at Every Size and the Size Acceptance movements. There is also a multicampus research group, Studies of Food and the Body, which I am part of, that combines food studies with culture and the body.

Technocultural Studies is a fairly new program. How does this program's philosophy differ from what you would have found at a university 10 years ago?

It's a new generation and a different media paradigm. For one thing, it is very important to be able to work across media. In other words, we are about media plural as opposed to medium singular, which doesn't only mean that we're teaching people to develop a lot of different skills; we're teaching people to combine skills in order to go across: to create sounds for a space, to create a Web site that talks to other Web sites.

What do you expect your students to get out of your video production, digital cinema or critical media courses?

Whether a person goes on to be a filmmaker or not, I want them to understand how images are put together, how stories are shaped and crafted, how news is shaped, how images are put together, and how facts are crafted.

I also want people to have experience stepping out of their comfort zone. Filmmaking, particularly documentary making, is a good way to do that because you are engaging with subjects by taking on a responsibility and developing a level of trust.

I see filmmaking as a survival skill tool kit. If you've made a short documentary, you have probably developed an ability to take other people's lives seriously and to come to understand what you didn't before.

When I think of making a documentary, I think about how complicated it is, how many steps you have to take. How hard is it?

It's like three-dimensional writing. Filmmaking is complicated. At every stage of the game — planning the production, shooting and then editing — there is a lot of thinking and strategizing on many levels simultaneously.

When you are filming a situation, you have to see it on its own terms and understand its importance to the subjects at that very moment, but then, at the same time, you have to step back and think about the situation in the terms of the story you are telling. You have to have multiple levels of vision simultaneously — all the while, you have to make sure you don't trip over a cable and fall on the ground.

What is the best part about documentaries?

There are two best parts for me — two different levels of communication. One is during the filming. When I am perceiving Cheryl and putting it on camera, it is really rewarding. I've understood something about her and about weightlifting.

And then, the other end of things is showing a film to an audience when it is done and feeling like they get it — and that the film communicated something to them. I provided them with an experience that goes beyond words. It happens for a few moments at the very end of hours and years of work, but it is very powerful.

What is this full-length documentary about and when will you finish?

I hope to finish sometime in the 2008-09 year between December 2008 and June 2009. Cheryl is America's No. 1 weightlifter — she is actually ranked highest across men and women. That doesn't mean she can lift more weight than men in the U.S., although she can lift more weight than most of them. It means on the world scale, when she compares to other women in her class, she's ranked third or fourth in the world, which is a higher ranking than any other current U.S. weightlifter.

Thematically, this documentary is about having a body that doesn't fit. It's about a body that is at once totally triumphant and successful and yet, in the scope of what we think about as a healthy, beautiful athlete's body, she is definitely outside the box.

What is your aim for this documentary? Awards? Get tenure?

Right, those things would be good. But my most general and important aim as a filmmaker is to allow people to experience their own physicality and see other people's physicality in a more expansive way. People generally see anything a few millimeters beyond the skeleton as extra and excessive to one's "natural" healthy body. I would like to challenge the audience's assumptions about the usefulness of weight and mass, and to allow the audience to consider that a broader range of bodies can signify strength, beauty and power.

To view some of Wyman's video clips, visit the UC Davis home page at www.ucdavis.edu.