The Flaherty is happy to announce the appointment of three new members to the Board of Trustees: Ruth Somalo, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Pablo de Ocampo. We are excited to work with each of them, as they all bring with them new insights into expanding and growing the organization's mission!
Pablo de Ocampo is a Vancouver-based film and exhibitions curator at Western Front, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals around the world, including at Power Plant in Toronto, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Experimenta in Bangalore, and the British Film Institute in London. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was artistic director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What’s Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series the Cinema Project in Portland, OR. In 2017, de Ocampo served as a panelist for Pew Fellowships.
Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Since 1995, he has created over 100 films, including Avenues, Second Shift, and Adult Material; often these are created in conjunction with visual art installations or paintings. Everson’s work has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Athens International Film Festival, London’s International Centre of the Arts, and the South by Southwest Film Festival. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. In 2018 he was the co-programmer of the 64th Flaherty Film Seminar, The Necessary Image. His visual art has been exhibited at the Whitney, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, and throughout Europe.
Ruth Somalo is a Spanish curator, filmmaker and researcher based in New York. She is a Programmer at DOC NYC, DocumentaMadrid and The Architecture and Design Film Festival, and was the co-director of Impugning Impunity Human Rights Film Festival. As an independent curator she is interested in the Poetics of Fragility and reclaiming a non-judgmental, non-anthropocentric space for emotions. Some of her independent programs include “ Holy Fluids and Absent Wounds”, “ Queer Utopias” (Union Docs) and Flaherty NYC 2017’s Winter/Spring Series “Broken Senses” (Anthology Film archives). She has specialized in creative nonfiction, she has worked in the audiovisual field in Spain, London and the U.S.A. Her films have been shown in theaters, festivals and museums internationally; among them the Verdi Cinemas, Zumzeig Cinema, Cineteca de Madrid/Contemporary Art Center Matadero de Madrid, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Cinema du Réel (Paris), ADFF (NY), L’Alternativa (CCCB Barcelona), Rural Life Museum, Documentamadrid, MOMA PS1 (Expo1) and at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam (Spanish Cinema Without Fear).