IMAGE names new festival director

• IMAGE Film & Video Center has named Jake Jacobson the new Atlanta Film Festival director. Jacobson, who replaces previous festival director Jessica Denton, worked as the inaugural festival director and programmer for the Rome International Film Festival and as a bureau chief for Westwood One/MetroNetworks in Atlanta.

“My entire life has been a dress rehearsal for this position,” says Jacobson, whose plans for the next Atlanta Film Festival, to be held June 9-17, include greater representation of Southern filmmakers and greater involvement from Atlanta’s Asian, African-American and Latino communities.

IMAGE is still searching for a new president and CEO to fill the position left vacant by previous President Alison Fussell. Former board member Jon Aaron is filling the president position until a successor can be found.

• The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities has chosen Atlanta’s Moving in the Spirit as one of 17 recipients of its annual Coming Up Taller Awards. Moving in the Spirit is the first Georgia organization to win the award, which recognizes community programs that develop children’s creativity and intellect through participation in the arts and humanities. The organization, which brings Atlanta at-risk youth together in a touring dance company, will receive $10,000 and perform at the White House on Jan. 25. An Atlanta event is in the works for early February.

• Atlanta’s JaCKPie Theatre Workshop, which specializes in long-form improv comedy, has become a resident company at Midtown’s new Relapse Theatre at 380 14th St.

• Yun Bai, an Atlanta artist profiled in the Creative Loafing feature “Flower of My Secret” in March 2003, has been selected by the Los Angeles alternative newspaper L.A. Weekly in its Jan. 6-12 edition as the top pick in a list of “10 Emerging Artists” by critic Peter Frank. Frank, however, mistakenly identifies Bai as a “New York transplant.”