2018 Flaherty Seminar Fellows

FLAHERTY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWS

Crystal Z Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist and writer of African-American, Filipino, and Chinese descent. Campbell’s practice ruptures collective memory, imagines social transformations, and questions the politics of witnessing. Recent works investigated Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cell line, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and gentrification via a 35mm-film relic salvaged from a now-demolished black Civil Rights theater in Brooklyn. Campbell exhibits internationally: ICA Philadelphia (US), Artericambi (IT), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Futura Contemporary (CZ), Project Row Houses (US), BRIC (US), de Appel Arts Centre (NL), Visual Studies Workshop (US), and Sculpture Center (US), amongst others. Selected honors include MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Smithsonian Fellowship, and Yaddo. Campbell is a former social worker and a third-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship recipient. Campbell lives and works in Tulsa, OK.

Ja’Tovia M. Gary is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed, while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her work has screened at film festivals, including Frameline LGBTQ, Edinburgh, New Orleans, Toronto, Inside Out, and Ann Arbor. Gary’s work is part of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection and has exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide, including the Schomburg Center, NYU Florence, Goldsmiths University, MoCA LA, MoMA, the Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, ICA Boston, and MoMA PS1. Her work has received support from the Sundance Institute and the Jerome Foundation.

Miguel Hilari is a documentary filmmaker/producer, based in La Paz, Bolivia. His first film, El corral y el viento (55 min, 2014), was screened at festivals, including Cinéma du Réel, CPH:DOX, Images, FIDOCS, Márgenes. His second film, Soñé con caballos, is in the final stage of production. He has done production, editing, and camerawork on several independent films, and is a member of the filmmakers collective Socavón Cine. He is coordinator of Festival de Cine Radical, a showcase of primarily documentary and experimental films held annually in La Paz. He has taught at Universidad Privada Boliviana and at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, and has been invited to tutor workshops in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. Hilari studied filmmaking in La Paz and Santiago de Chile and holds a Master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, MI; he is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Khalil’s work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Khalil’s films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, Walker Arts Center, e-flux, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), and Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). Khalil graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College. He is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, Gates Millennium Scholar, 2017 Sundance Indigenous Opportunity Fellow, and 2018 Sundance Art of Non Fiction grant recipient.

BUENOS AIRES YOUNG ARTIST FELLOW

Pavel Tavares was born in Bahia, Brazil, and resides in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where he currently works as a professor of Audiovisual Projects, as well as taking care of the audiovisual archive of the Faculty of Architecture and Design (FADU). He has directed documentaries, including Jasy Porã (Beautiful Moon), made in Argentina; Alexander, made in Russia; The Last Small Village, made in China. His feature documentary, Ojo de Mar, is in post-production and a feature film, Yo Emigro, is in development, among other planned projects. He won prizes for best short film, best experimental video, a scholarship at the National Fund of Arts and in the Young Art Biennial in Argentina, among others. He is interested in the distinctiveness of each culture, identities, and the crossing of borders.

CAAM FELLOW

Kimi Maeda is a theater artist based in South Carolina and Japan. Her ephemera trilogy, a collection of sand drawing and shadow performances that deal with memory, home, and transcultural identity, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2017. Maeda received a Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission in 2017. She was selected by Ford Foundation Just Films to participate in the Open Immersion Lab at the National Film Board of Canada and the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto in 2017. She was the recipient of the 2015 Jasper Magazine Visual Artist of the Year Award, the 2005 Rose Brand Award in Scenic Design from USITT, and her costume design for Polaroid Stories was chosen for display in the 2007 Prague Quadrennial.

CALARTS FELLOWS

Aitziber Olaskoaga was born in the Basque Country (Spain). She moved to Barcelona to study filmmaking at the ESCAC, where she majored in cinematography. Her film Smiling on the Phone has been screened in festivals around Spain and Europe and won a special mention at the Jihlava International Documentary Festival (Czech Republic). In 2016, she moved to Los Angeles to start a master’s program in Film and Video at CalArts, where she also works as the lead projectionist of the school’s theater. She’s currently working on a film essay that reflects upon nationalism and the construction of national identity in the context of the Basque Country. She will be carrying out a residency at BilbaoArte (Bilbao, Spain) from June to December 2018.

Sara Suarez is a filmmaker and sound artist based in Los Angeles. She will complete her MFA this spring at CalArts, where she studies Film Directing. She grew up in Virginia and graduated from the College of William and Mary before moving to California; her current project centers on the landscape and Civil War history of Richmond, VA. As a filmmaker, Sara focuses on the boundaries of observable reality and spiritual imagination, and humans’ relationships to the environment, preservation, and decay. She works with both analog 16mm film and digital media, and creates otherworldly soundscapes using ambience and field recordings. In addition to her film work Sara has worked as a sound editor and studio recordist; as an editing assistant to Lee Anne Schmitt; at FilmIndependent; and in radio and podcast production.

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS FELLOW

Bianka Bell is a 23-year-old San Francisco-based writer, filmmaker, actor and musician. Though well-versed and interested in politics (which she majored in at Bard College), she has been involved with an array of film, music, and print media projects throughout her adolescence, undergraduate, and post-graduate years. She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Film at California College of the Arts. Her decision to pursue the arts came subsequent to her understanding of how our present society functions: Our generation is enthralled by messages which are disseminated through artistic mediums, resulting in a general proliferation of awareness and advocacy for crucial social and political movements of this time. Since recognizing this, Bianka has conjured in her mind that it is her duty as both an artist and a socially aware citizen to disperse progressive ideologies throughout all her works—both fictional and nonfictional.

CURATORIAL FELLOW – HONORING DAVID PENDLETON

Victor Guimaraes is a film critic with the Brazilian online journal, Cinética, since 2012. He has also collaborated with film journals such as Senses of Cinema (Australia), Desistfilm (Peru), and La Furia Umana (Italy). He was a professor at UNA University Center (Belo Horizonte), Positivo University (Curitiba), and Vila das Artes (Fortaleza). As a programmer, he was one of the artistic directors of Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (2014), a member of the selection committee at Forumdoc.bh (2012 to 2015), and curator of retrospectives such as Sabotadores da Indústria (Belo Horizonte), Argentina Rebelde (Rio), and L.A. Rebellion (Recife). He is the author of O hip hop e a intermitência política do documentário (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação Social da UFMG, 2015) and the editor of Doméstica (Desvia, 2015). He is also a PhD student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), with a doctoral internship at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3).

CURATORIAL FELLOWS – FORD FOUNDATION JUSTFILMS

Dessane Lopez Cassell is a writer, curator, and film programmer, based in New York. An alumna of Oberlin College and of the U.S. Fulbright program, Dessane has also worked in literacy development, and has produced numerous radio and podcast projects. Trained as a modern and contemporary art historian, Dessane has over six years of experience in museums. Her recent positions include a Curatorial Fellowship between the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art Film Department. Her projects there included assisting with Fictions and Signature: Graphic Design from The Studio Museum Archive, and at MoMA, co-organizing the film series “Making Faces on Film: A collaboration with BFI Black Star” and the exhibition Making Faces: Images of Exploitation and Empowerment in Cinema, both of which focused on historical constructions of blackness and otherness in cinema. A native New Yorker, Dessane is currently the Programs Coordinator at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer and arts administrator based in Florida. She has written for Aperture, IAM magazine, Temporary Art Review, Recess, and the Houston Center for Photography, amongst others. Currently, Ladi’Sasha is the Sophie Davis Curatorial Fellow for Gender and Racial Parity at the Norton Museum of Art. Prior to this appointment, she held positions at the New Museum’s IdeasCity platform and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. As a founding board member of the I, Too, Arts Collective, Ladi’Sasha is part of a group working to transform the historic landmark brownstone of American poet Langston Hughes into a residency for Black writers. She holds a BA in African American Studies from Temple University and an MA in Arts Politics from New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

DUKE UNIVERSITY FELLOW

Felicity Palma is an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring women’s stories at the intersections of migration, folklore, and feminism. Her work to date has explored women’s embodied traumas, young women living with cancer, the connection between landscape and memory, anti-immigrant sentiment in the Mediterranean, and the social construction of race in southern Italy. Born and raised in California, she has spent significant time studying, working, and researching in New York, Italy, South Africa, and Mexico. As a candidate for an MFA in Experimental & Documentary Art at Duke University, she is currently based in Durham, NC, and is working alongside artists Shambhavi Kaul and Tom Rankin. Her preferred mediums include 16mm film, medium format photography, fiber arts, and soundscapes.

GEORGE STONEY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOW

Christina Phoebe Thomopoulos is an artist, researcher, and activist. Her work in performance, installation, photography, film, and drawing often explores the personal and political in the everyday, through playful and humorous experimentations. Diaspora and exile are recurring themes. Her work has been shown at Flux Factory (NY), the Greek Film Archive, YNKB (Copenhagen), Abofoun Gallery (Accra), the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, and Jeu de Paume’s le magazine. She studied Studio Art and Africana Studies at New York University, and was a student in the Seminar for Creative Documentary led by Christos Karakepelis and Natasha Segou at the TV Control Center (Athens, Greece). She has written for visAvis: Voices on asylum and migration, Freie Theater, ArtsEverywhere, and Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, amongst others, and currently works as Associate Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos” on projects regarding audiovisual storytelling, game design, and archaeology. Her upcoming film, Amygdaliá, comes out in 2018.

HARVARD FILM STUDY CENTER FELLOWS

Joseph Pomp is a film scholar currently completing a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, at Harvard University. His dissertation examines the history of the French conception of the director as author and explores the degree to which this literary bias has affected postcolonial African cinema funded by the French government. The written work will be complemented by a website with interactive maps and videographic essays. His previous videos have engaged with the Chabad Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Judaism, a Korean business in Ho Chi Minh City, and cinematic appearances of the street he grew up on in New York. He has also contributed to many publications, including BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Senses of Cinema.

Jessica Sarah Rinland is an Argentine-British artist filmmaker who has exhibited work in galleries, cinemas, film festivals, and universities internationally, including New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She has received grants from Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust, Elephant Trust, and elsewhere. Residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Kingston University, Locarno Academy, and Berlinale Talents. In 2016 she exhibited a multiscreen, randomized installation, We Account the Whale Immortal, at Somerset House, London. She is currently an Associate Artist at Somerset House Studios, a 2017 Schnitzer prize awardee at M.I.T., and a Film Studies Center Fellow at Harvard University.

LEF NEW ENGLAND FELLOWS

Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore the histories of the labor movement in the Arab world and its connections to Latin America, feminist internationalism, and new transformative possibilities. From 2006 to 2008, she produced the community broadcast television program, Via Comunidad, with the art collective Vientos del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador. Her feature debut, A Feeling Greater Than Love, won the FIPRESCI Critics Prize at the 2017 Berlinale Forum. Saba is a member of the artist cooperative cooperative/تعاونية, and her work continues to be deeply linked to political praxis. She is currently developing a variety of film projects: an essay about internationalism, solidarities, and love set between the Middle East and Latin America, a supply chain ethnography on scrap recycling in Lebanon and Syria, and an experimental fiction with vampires. She holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard College, an MA in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a 2014-15 participant in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Lebanon.

Jesse Lockwood Kreitzer is a filmmaker from Marlboro, VT, whose interests include rural storytelling, agrarian life, and folk cultures. Using genealogy, oral history, and archival materials as creative conduits, Kreitzer’s films explore the fragility of memory, lineage, and tradition. His work has been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and museums, including: National Gallery of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, Biografilm, Raindance, Oldenburg, Camden, and Ashland, among others. He has received Oscar®-qualifying and regional Emmy® awards. Kreitzer is currently producing Caregivers, a documentary hybrid about eldercare in the hills of rural Vermont. Told over the course of four seasons and featuring live accompaniment by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, the film is a powerful meditation on acts of compassion, guilt, and the search for closure.

Erin Murphy is a documentary filmmaker, educator, and freelance videographer, based in Portland, ME. She is in production on a feature-length documentary, Wazo:Idea, which documents the emergence of a diverse group of young activist-artists by exploring the ways that film and social media shape what we know and who we think we are. Her last short film, The Song of the Broad Axe (2016), follows the lives of people who have chosen to live a more purposeful life—one that involves using an axe on a daily basis. The film will air statewide on Maine Public Television in late-2018. Erin teaches documentary production as a visiting instructor at Colby College. She graduated from the University of Texas with an MA in Media Studies and has a BA in film from North Carolina State University. As a freelancer, Erin has shot and produced over 20 documentaries shorts for clients in Maine and Massachusetts.

Nerissa L. Williams is the CEO/Owner of TCGT Entertainment and is Assistant Manager for the Emerson College Paramount Center Film Sound Stage, in Boston, MA. She graduated from Hampton University with a BA in Fine and Performing Arts, and received her MFA in Film Production (emphasis in Producing) from Emerson College. Her career experience includes more than thirty years of working and learning in Performing and Media Art. She began on stage and worked her way up to the position of Producer and Creative Producer for film, TV, live events, theater, and music videos. Her world travels have set her apart in the Creative Producer role as she strives to balance the fine art of Line Producing, Production Management, as well as Creative Producer. Her directing chops have been sharpened while at Emerson College, with a variety of projects under her belt. She looks forward to the ongoing forward momentum of TCGT. Her favorite quote, “Wow them with Brilliance.”

PHILADELPHIA FOUNDATION FELLOWS

Tatiana Bacchus, Executive Director of Teaspoon & Pound Media, LLC, is an emerging independent filmmaker who curates the ancestral wisdom of invisible characters by telling their untold stories. Tatiana’s current project slate includes the documentaries Freedom Denied and Ulrick, and an educational children’s program entitled On the JOB, with Lani Lou! As a freelance Producer/Director, Tatiana has production managed shoots at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Mütter Museum. Tatiana’s clients include private, nonprofit, and educational organizations. A working actress for over a decade, Tatiana will be appearing in the upcoming feature films The Upside and Glass. Tatiana received a BA in Psychology from Temple University and is a recipient of a Leeway Art and Change Grant (2009, 2014), Her Film Project, Small But Mighty Arts, and Lucius and Eva Eastman grants.

M. Asli Dukan is a filmmaker and visual artist who subverts the genres of speculative fiction (SF) as a way to explore the possibility of the transformation of society. She has made nearly a dozen short films which have screened at various festivals, including the Black Star Film Festival in Philadelphia. In 2017, her mixed-media installation, Resistance Time Portal, which centered Black radicalism in a futuristic narrative, made its debut in the Distance≠Time exhibition, co-presented by Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurism collective. Asli has received several commendations, most recently a 2016 Transformation Award from the Leeway Foundation. The same year, she was named an NBPC 360 fellow by Black Public Media and participated in a six-week media incubator in New York City. She is currently completing Invisible Universe, a documentary about Black SF creators, and Resistance: the Battle of Philadelphia, an SF web series about a community’s struggle against state violence.

Catalina Jordan Alvarez grew up in rural Tennessee with a Colombian mother and an American father, and studied Experimental Theater in New York City and Film Directing in Berlin. She incorporates her international and experimental theater background into filmic narratives, such as Paco, a comic portrait of a cat caller choreographed with a nonprofessional cast and captured with 16mm photography. Paco has screened at Slamdance Film Festival, LA Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Fantastic Fest (winner, Best Picture), and thirty other festivals. Her other films include Kallocain, a science fiction short about the development of an inner truth serum, and Das Goldene Licht, a “Bergfilm” about a blind grandmother who climbs the Alps, starring the Swiss post-punk pop group, Les Reines Prochaines. She is currently in development of a feature-length narrative, a series continuing Paco, and a 360-degree film.

Meredith Sellers is an artist, writer, and educator living and working in Philadelphia. She received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtsJournal, Pelican Bomb, The Artblog, The St. Claire, and DailyServing; she is a 2017 Art Writing Workshop participant for the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant Program. She is a Managing Editor at Title Magazine, a Philadelphia-based publication featuring artists’ critical, creative, and experimental writing and text-based works. She has exhibited her work at ICA Philadelphia, Lord Ludd, Icebox Project Space, Delaware County Community College, and Vox Populi. She has curated exhibitions at the Crane Arts Center, Pilot Projects, and Esther Klein Gallery. She works as the Arts Programs Coordinator for the Center for Education at the Mütter Museum.

Monika Uchiyama is an artist working primarily in video. Her work employs personal narratives to investigate the ways in which coping strategies linked to physical, social, and generational trauma reveal themselves through storytelling. Before pursuing her art practice, she worked as a Japanese / English translator and interpreter in Tokyo. She has shown in group exhibitions in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Automat, as well as in New York City at PAGE (NYC). She received her BA from CUNY City College of New York, attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, and recently completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sonali Udaybabu is pursuing an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. In her young career, she has been involved in queer feminist and media activism in India, and has worked as a cinematographer and on the post-production of documentary and narrative film projects. Her interests include visual anthropology, sexuality politics, intersectionality, social justice and advocacy, and spirituality. Sonali is also a yoga teacher, and strives to apply the practice of yogic and Vedanta inquiry to work and everyday life.

PRINCESS GRACE FOUNDATION – USA FELLOWS

Mitch McCabe is an educator and filmmaker whose work spans narrative and documentary film. Her short films Playing the Part, September 5:10pm, Highway 403, Mile 39 and To Whom It May Concern have screened at Sundance, New Directors/ New Films, New York Film Festival. Her narrative feature, Corrosion, premiered at Norwegian Film Festival and her feature HBO documentary Youth Knows No Pain screened at IDFA, Lincoln Center, and AFI Silverdocs, among others. McCabe’s work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, LEF Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, Jerome Foundation, SPACE Gallery, iPark Foundation, and NYSCA. She has worked extensively as a cinematographer for series on A&E, Discovery, and TNT. She is a Visiting Professor of Film Studies at Trinity College and joins the faculty at SUNY-Purchase College in Fall 2018. She received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA from NYU.

Natalie Tsui is a media artist born in Hong Kong, now living and working in Oakland, CA. Coming from a background as a filmmaker, Tsui appropriates traditional cinematic techniques to bring awareness to the exaptation of photography and motion imaging to propagate Western, heteronormative ideologies. Her work utilizes rhizomatic structures, spatial-temporal displacement, repetition, and performance to unsettle the cinematic gaze, inviting poetic interpretation and critical reflection on visual culture. Tsui received a BA in Film Studies and English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 and an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2014. Her work has been screened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Frameline, Museu de Arts Moderna of Rio de Janiero, Southern Exposure, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of the Fotokem Graduate Student Grant and the Princess Grace Film Honorarium, among others.

SOLOTHURN FILM FESTIVAL FELLOW

Caroline Cuenod has always been fascinated by systems and the workings of a society; she has written essays on video surveillance and on 18th-century court records. With Landlocked (75 min, 2018), she explores Switzerland’s little-known relationship to the sea, and unveils all the mechanisms that this small landlocked country has put into place in order to insulate itself from external crises and to reinforce the image of stability that it promotes internationally. Does this mean that her cinema is only issue-based? The short answer is no. The characters are always at the center, with tenderness for the little people, the administrative officials, the CCTV operators, the mechanics on the boats. Most of the time, Caroline Cuénod knows where her films start, but she only becomes aware of their political dimension as the project evolves and matures.

UC SAN DIEGO FELLOW

Sindhu Thirumalaisamy is an artist and filmmaker with an interest in sound and spatial politics. She is an MFA student in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Following the multiple ways in which sound challenges regimes of representation and control, Sindhu’s work engages a poetics of uncontainability across different sites, cultures, and borders. It approaches listening as both an inward experience and as a gesture that is interested in the expansive environments with/in which we arrange our lives. Sindhu regularly works with other artists and activists, taking on roles of researcher, recordist, editor, and performer. She has participated in exhibitions and programs at Artists’ Television Access (San Francisco), SOMA Summer (Mexico City), University of Oslo, UC San Diego, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Edinburgh Festival of Art, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Khoj International Artists’ Association (New Delhi), and Dharamshala International Film Festival.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO FELLOW

Amy Richman is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the lines between internal and external realities through photography, animation, and writing. Richman is currently a second-year MFA candidate in the department of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Richman earned a BA in Photography and a BA in English Literature from the University of Denver. 

UC SAN DIEGO FELLOW

Taryn Ely is a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She is a VCS fellow who specializes in disability studies, the history of psychology, and avant-garde film. Her current research focuses on the emergence of Borderline Personality Disorder as it relates to intellectual histories of psychology and aesthetics. She is also a member of the student-run screening program On Film. Taryn received her BA summa cum laude with research distinction in Comparative Culture Studies from Ohio State University. Her undergraduate thesis explored the films of Maya Deren and the Black Audio Film Collective through the lens of mental disability. She has worked at various art institutions, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, Ohio.