DOUWE DIJKSTRA

April. 18 2023

Hybrid Event

Douwe Dijkstra (b. 1984, The Netherlands) is a filmmaker and visual artist, operating in a mixture of video, animation and VFX. His projects range from short films and documentaries to video installations and theater performances.

He moves freely and playfully in a meta-area he has hammered out on his own, a narrative style that crosses the traditional boundaries between documentary and fiction, essay and experiment. With an underlying social engagement, he employs his intrinsic humor to disarm and get under the skin of people, to deliver playful treatments of at times difficult subjects.

Dijkstra studied Illustration Design at the ArtEZ University of the Arts. In 2008 he co-founded 33⅓ Collective with Jules van Hulst and Coen Huisman, a multimedia platform that worked on various visual theatrical projects. The complete works of the collective, through 2019, can be seen on 33one3rd.com. A behind the scenes look at Dijkstra’s practice can be found on his instagram page.

VISIONS OF CONTEMPORARY IRAN

April. 4 2023

Hybrid Event

The Department of Film and Video and the Office of Academic Affairs at the are pleased to present Visions of Contemporary Iran: Iranian Women Filmmaker Panel on Tuesday April 4, 2023. This installment of the series is co-programmed by MassArt Graduate Programs (Film/Video) alum and current faculty Homa Sarabi.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS:

• Mahsa Biglow (A Letter from an Alien Relative, 2021, 05:19) is a New York based, Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her research-based work investigates the intersection of art, mass media, technology, and postcolonialism. She explores these themes in video, installation, and performance through storytelling, oral history, and found footage. With her multi-channel video and sound installations, she creates immersive spaces that grapple with the agenda-setting role of television, social media, and other mass-distributed media. She earned an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from the University of Tehran. A writer and associate editor at Kaarnamaa; A Journal of Art History and Criticism, Biglow writes critiques and reviews on contemporary art in the Persian language.
• Arezou Ghasemi (Tehran) (PandeMe, 2022, 05:07) is a graduate of Tehran university with a BFA in photography. Her projects are inspired by her lived experiences and personal life. Human presence is at the core of her work. She examines the limits of lens-based media, and often works in multimedia installation.
• Setare Gholipour (Broken bones; and I’m still laughing, 2017, 04:21) is an Iranian filmmaker living and working in New York. She holds a degree in Documentary Filmmaking from The New School, New York, and a BFA in Cinema from Tehran University of Art, Iran.
• Anisa Hosseinnezhad (she/her) (Wherever The War, Whoever The Enemy, 2021, 05:41) is an Iranian artist and filmmaker. Her film and video work focuses on issues of displacement, immigration, and the militaristic U.S. imaginary. Her research is centered on West Asia, as rendered by western media and its frequent collaborator, the U.S. military-industrial complex.
• Nazanin Noroozi (Featured films listed below) is a multimedia artist incorporating moving images, printmaking and alternative photography processes to reflect on notions of collective memory, displacement and uncertainty. Noroozi’s work has been widely exhibited internationally. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (film & video), Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Fellowship at Dieu Donne’, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and MASS MoCA residency (MA). She is an editor at large of Kaarnamaa, a Journal of Art History and Criticism. Noroozi completed her MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute. Her works have been featured in various publications and media including Zeit Magazine, BBC News Persian, Elephant Magazine, Financial Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. (The Riptide, 2021, 04:58 / Purl, 2019, 02:41 / Elite 1984, 2018. Stop-motion video, 03:15 )

ADINAH DANCYGER

Feb. 28 2023

Hybrid Event

ADINAH DANCYGER is a Korean-Polish, first-generation American filmmaker born and raised in New York City. Her short films have screened at various festivals, some of which include: Sundance, Berlinale, and New York Film Festival. Her most recent short film, Moving, received the grand jury prize at slamdance film festival. her commercial work includes clients such as: Gucci, Nike, Tory Burch, Adidas, Converse and more. Dancyger is a fellow of the 2017 New York Film Festival’s artist academy and the 20th annual hamptons screenwriting lab. Dancyger received a bachelor’s degree in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College.

SARAH EMA FRIEDLAND: Specualtion and Fantasy in Documentary

Feb. 21 2023

Hybrid Event

Operating on a firm belief that reality has been messed with since people started telling stories and writing histories, SARAH EMA FRIEDLAND’s work is rooted in non-fiction but often uses the vocabularies of speculative fiction and fantasy to tweak and re-imagine reality. Friedland’s works have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Palestine American Research Center, the LABA House of Study, and the MacDowell Colony. She was named one of the “Top 10 Independent Filmmakers to Watch” by the Independent Magazine, is a recipient of the Paul Robeson award from the Newark Museum, and was nominated for a New York Emmy. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Variety, The Brooklyn Rail, and Filmmaker Magazine. She has published essays and reviews about film in Filmmaker Magazine and the Millenium Film Journal. She is currently working on a feature documentary titled Lyd, which she is co-directing with Rami Younis, and which was selected to pitch at the DocCorner Market at the Cannes Film Festival and Days of Cinema in Ramallah. Friedland received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and the International School of Film and Television in Cuba and her MFA from the Integrated Media Art Program at Hunter College. Friedland is a member of the Meerkat Media Collective and the Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College where she is also a Teaching Professor in the MDOCS Program.

Travis Wood is a director from Minneapolis, sometimes based in Brooklyn. His short films have been selected for multiple Vimeo Staff Picks, SXSW film festival, True/False, Rooftop films, an NY EMMY award, and featured on NoBudge, Booooooom and Directors Notes. He is a current member of the Meerkat Media Artist Collective and part of the commercial directing team at Farm League.

Claudia Zamora-Valencia works at the intersection of ethnography, documentary art, and community organizing. She is a third-year PhD student in anthropology at Temple University and her research interests include labor markets, infrastructure, the state, and nature. Claudia’s doctoral project focuses on the development of the Pacific coast of Oaxaca and the role of mega-projects like the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor in shaping relationships between local communities, capital, and the environment. She earned an MFA in Integrated Media and Arts from CUNY Hunter College, and since 2012, she has worked with organizations that advocate for immigrant and labor rights in New York City. She received a BA in anthropology from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla and graduated cum laude. Her undergraduate thesis received an honorary mention from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Claudia has published in academic journals and her personal and collaborative films have screened at Ambulante Film Festival, Society for Visual Anthropology, Camden International Film Festival, DOC NYC, Latin American Studies Association, Single Frame, UnionDocs, Workers Unite Film Festival, PBS Digital Studios, among others. She is a member of the New York based Meerkat Media Collective and a fellow at the Society for Visual Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation, where she is conducting a participatory research and art project with immigrant women working in NYC building trades. Claudia grew up in Oaxaca and lives and works in Philadelphia and NYC.

Chloe Gbai is an Emmy-nominated producer and creative exec on the Original Documentary Films team at Netflix. She joined Netflix from IF/Then Shorts at Field of Vision, a program that identifies and supports original, standalone short documentaries made by filmmakers working in and representing their communities. Previously, as the POV Shorts and Streaming Producer, she launched POV Shorts, which in its first season earned a documentary short Oscar nomination, two Emmy nominations, and an IDA Awards nomination for Best Short Form Series. She is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, a 2020 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, a DOC NYC New Leader, and a member-in-residence of the Meerkat Media Collective.

NAZLI DINÇEL

Feb. 07 2023

Hybrid Event

NAZLI DINÇEL’s hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption. They record the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society.

Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United States at age 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI. They obtained their MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Their works have been exhibited globally including the Museum of Modern art in New York, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vienna Modern art Museum, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Walker Art Center and Hong Kong International Film Festival. They were most recently a 2019/2020 Radcliffe Institute fellow for advanced study at Harvard University, and a 2019 Emerging Artist recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship.

In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with their work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.

Dinçel transitioned to they/them in 2022. All genders in previous works and writings should be understood accordingly.

SARAH E. JENKINS

Jan. 31 2023

Hybrid Event

SARAH E. JENKINS (she/they) is a queer Appalachian artist working primarily in experimental animation. Their recent work explores extraction, hidden labors, and disappearance via in-studio and site-responsive stop motion animation and sound. Their work has been exhibited and screened at the MFA Boston, Wheaton College, Torrance Art Museum, The Lesbian and Gay Association in Germany, Wonzimer, and GRRL HAUS Cinema (Boston/Berlin). Jenkins’ recent residencies include MacDowell and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and she will be an artist in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute for their 2023 Thematic Residency: Changing Climate. Their work is included in the forthcoming book Queering Appalachia’s Visual History: A Collection of Queer Appalachian Photographers, University of Kentucky Press, fall 2024. Jenkins works out of her studio at Vernon Street and lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with her darling cat, Nessie.

Lynne Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Over the last four decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, documentary, performance, and collage. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Working from a feminist perspective, she investigates connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Sachs uses letters, archives, diaries, poetry and music, to take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Sachs’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Walker, and at New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, Rotterdam, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Cork Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival, and Costa Rica Int’l Festival de Cine. Both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.

Tara Merenda Nelson is a filmmaker, curator, programmer and lecturer working between material, conceptual and perceptual realms with small gauge film and digital media. Her films, videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY and Miami), Mono No Aware (Brooklyn), The 8Fest (Canada), VideoEx (Switzerland) and the Sydney Underground Film Festival (AUS). She has taught digital media and film production courses at Montserrat, Ithaca College, Cornell University, University of Rochester and SUNY Brockport. Currently she is the Curator and Director of Public Programs at Visual Studies Workshop, where she teaches 16mm film production and oversees a collection of over 10,000 16mm films and magnetic media titles. Tara is also the Programmer for the VSW Salon series. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Tara currently resides in Rochester NY with her husband Gordon and dog Lucy.

Shawn Cotter is an experimental handmade filmmaker whose Super 8mm films have shown internationally. Shawn currently lives in Malden, MA with his four cats and counts among his favorite filmmakers Joe Gage, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, RW Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, Kenneth Anger, Wong Kar-Wai, Doris Wishman, Jess Franco and Dario Argento. He is currently serving as the executive director of Wicked Queer:Boston’s LGBTQ+ Film Festival, an organization that he has been part of for the last decade.

Both MFA graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Ken Linehan and Brittany Gravely work as artists of many media both separately and together as “Magical Approach” with a focus on 16mm film, sound and psychic experimentation. Both members of Boston’s AgX Film Collective, their films have recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, Crossroads, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among others. For years, Ken taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Brittany works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA.

With a focus on sound and audio media, Ken Linehan‘s creative work explores intermedia space through works including field recording, 16mm films, silkscreen, and a variety of music projects. Having graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Kenneth has taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Most recently, Ken has been engaged in a series of psychic/cinematic collaborations in Magical Approach with Brittany Gravely.  Over the past decade his work has been exhibited at arts spaces, live music and cinematic venues such as the RISD Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Apex Art, AS220 and the Brattle Theatre, including events programed by Mono No Aware, Magic Lantern Cinema,  Millennium Film Workshop & Balagan Films.

Artistically Brittany Gravely has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, Crossroads, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among others. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA.

BAYLEY SWEITZER is a filmmaker living and working in Brooklyn, whose practice revolves around an ongoing attempt to repurpose narrative film form in order to convey radical political possibilities. His work has been shown at Film at Lincoln Center, Walker Art Center, Tate Modern, Berlinale, Anthology Film Archives, Bozar in Brussels, Pacific Film Archive, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Other Cinema in San Francisco, and Artists Space in New York City. Sweitzer has received a 2021 Creative Capital Awards and recent moving image commissions from the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, Gasworks in London, and Spike Island in Bristol. Sweitzer also works professionally as a focus puller and is a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600.

ZINNIA NAQV (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, language, and gender through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her artworks often invite the viewer to consider the position of the artist and the spectator, as well as analyze the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera.

Naqvi’s work has been exhibited and screened across Canada and internationally. She is a 2022 Fall Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence and recipient of the 2019 New Generation Photography Award organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Naqvi is member of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group, an intergenerational feminist collective. Naqvi received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.