FLEX FEST 2011 Jurors TBD

PAST GUESTS

FLEX FEST 2010

Jacqueline Goss
Jacqueline Goss makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary. Her most recent videos are "How To Fix The World"--a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930s Central Asia--and "Stranger Comes To Town"--an animated documentary about the identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United States. A native of New Hampshire, she attended Brown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College in New York. In 2008 she received the Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellowship, in 2007 the Herb Alpert Award in Film and Video, and in 2005 a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.

Helga Fanderl
Working exclusively in the small-gauge super 8mm film format and editing entirely in camera, Helga Fanderl has directed more than 400 short films over the last several decades ranging from observational documentary portraits to more abstract, poetic works.

Born in Ingolstadt in 1947 and turning to celluloid only later in her life (in 1990), Fanderl studied German and Romance Languages and Literature in Munich, Paris and Frankfurt/Main (1967-1973) before attending the Art School (Städelschule) in Frankfurt/Main (1987-1992) and Cooper Union in New York City (1992-1993). Since 1990 her work has been presented in major film museums, museums of modern and contemporary art, galleries, and other locations. Among these venues are the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt/Main.; Arsenal, Berlin; Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Basel; Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main.; Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris; Kino im Kunstmuseum, Bern; Cineteca di Bologna; The New York Public Library, New York; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Her films are in the permanent collections of many museums including Hans Bodenmann, Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main; and the Auditorium du Louvre, Paris. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1992 Coutts Contemporary Art Award; the 1998 German Film Critics Award / category experimental film; a 1999-2000 Scholarship Hessische Kulturstiftung in Paris; and the 2000 Hessischer Kulturpreis. She has recently been the subject of retrospectives of her works at several major festivals including Views from the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival.

Michael Gitlin
Michael Gitlin's work has been screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and the 1997 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.

Johan Grimonprez
Johan Grimonprez studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Grimonprez's Looking for Alfred (2005) won the International Media Award (ZKM, Germany) in 2005 as well as the European Media Award in 2006.

Grimonprez's productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin. Curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez's work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York).

2009

Abina Manning
Abina Manning is currently the Director of the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois. She has worked to promote artists' film and video for many years, in both Europe and the United States. Prior to coming to the VDB in 1999, she worked with a number of arts organizations in the U.K., including the LUX Center, the London Film Maker's Co-op, London Electronic Arts, and Cinema of Women. She was Director of the inaugural Pandaemonium Festival of Moving Images, a major European exhibition presented by the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London that showcased film, video, gallery commissions, and multi-media works. The Guardian called the Pandaemonium Festival, "A rich lucky-dip of the sublime and the startling."

Abina has participated in many international film and video festivals and conferences as a juror, panel member, curator, and advisor, and has worked on collaborative projects with arts venues worldwide. Abina has a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Philosophy from Middlesex University and a Post Graduate Diploma in Film and Television from the University of Westminster (London).

Andrea Grover
Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now-recognized center for filmic art, that began in Grover's living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (PHANTOM CAPTAIN, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently programmed an evening of films for Dia Art Foundation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York (LESSONS IN THE SKY, 2009); and has inaugurated a new semi-annual screening series, MENIL MOVIES, with The Menil Collection. Currently on view is 29 CHAINS TO THE MOON, an exhibition she curated for Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, which continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

"2007" (Jan. 2008)

Jim Trainor
Jim Trainor is a filmmaker, mostly an animator, living in Chicago. He is just now completing a series of films called The Animals and their Limitations, of which "Harmony" is the latest installment, with "The Bat and the Virgin," "The Bats," "The Moschops," and "The Magic Kingdom" preceding it. Most recently, he has been working on a long comic strip project called Sun Shames Headhunting Moon. Trainor teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Helen Hill was a filmmaker, artist, and social activist who lived in New Orleans when she was killed in January 2007. Educated at Harvard and the California Institute of the Arts, Hill taught animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative in Halifax, Nova Scotia and later at the New Orleans Video Access Center and New Orleans Film Collective, which she helped found. Hill also authored a DIY filmmaking guide, Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbook. Her films include "Madame Winger Makes a Film," "Mouseholes," "Scratch and Crow," "Bohemian Town," and "Rain Dance."

Leighton Pierce
Leighton Pierce lives in New York City and Iowa City, where he is a professor of film and video at the University of Iowa. His films have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, and his video installations have been exhibited at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. His works include "Water Seeking Its Level," "Glass," "50 Feet of String," and "The Back Steps."

Diane Bonder
Diane Bonder, a filmmaker and graphic designer, died of pancreatic cancer in Brooklyn in June 2006. Bonder's films and videos include "Dear Mom," "If," "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now," and "Closer to Heaven." Retrospectives of Bonder's work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Cinematheque. She was a regular contributor to both the Mix NYC and Mad Cat Women's Festivals, and possessed degrees from UMass Amherst and Rutgers University.

2006

Craig Baldwin
Craig Baldwin is the evil genius behind Other Cinema and the motor that drives Artists' Television Access in San Francisco. In addition to his exhaustive curatorial efforts, he's also an amazing found footage filmmaker, whose films include Tribulation 99, Sonic Outlaws, and Spectres of the Spectrum. He's also an incredible resource for other found footage filmmakers--check out the credits of any experimental film that uses a lot of found images and you're likely to see his name.

Mike Plante
Mike Plante is the programmer at Cinevegas as well as one of the shorts programmers at Sundance. He also is the man behind Cinemad, one of the greatest film 'zines in the Free World.

2005

Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based filmmaker who leaves town a lot. Her films blur the lines between experimental and documentary genres, and she frequently works in other media including photography, sound, drawing and architectural intervention. She is presently collecting responses about FEAR (call toll-free: 1-800-585-1078) and is working on some short films about falling and other events that separate us from the system of things.  Deborah teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts.

Bill Brown
Bill Brown makes movies about ghosts that masquerade as movies about landscapes-- or maybe it's the other way around. His films include Roswell, Hub City, Confederation Park, Buffalo Common, and Mountain State. In 2003, the Museum of Modern Art screened a retrospective of his work as part of its MediaScope series. These days, Brown is wondering why he's living in Detroit.

Scott Stark
Scott Stark has made over 65 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages as well. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He has recently moved from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video. More information is available at www.scottstark.com.

2004

Naomi Uman
Naomi Uman is an independent filmmaker and former personal chef to the stars (Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, et al.).