Faculty
Ariana Gerstein began making experimental films in the 1990's as a graduate of the Cinema Department at Binghamton University. She left Binghamton to receive her M.F.A. in Filmmaking from the School of Art Institute of Chicago where she was awarded a full Trustees Merit Scholarship. She taught in Chicago at Columbia College and the Academy of Art before returning to Binghamton University.
Her independent works have included digital video, sculpture, installation and performance. Her films have been screened and awarded prizes at many festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Charlotte International, San Francisco International, London International, Black Maria Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival,New York Film Festival, SXSW, and others. Her films have shown at Anthology Film Archives in New York, San Francisco Cinematheque, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Film Archives in Berkley, and other locations. She has recieved grants from the Illinois Arts Council, New York Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation of the Arts. Her short film "Alice Sees The Light" is currently nationally broadcast on the P.B.S. series P.O.V. See interview at : http://www.pbs.org/pov/alice/interview.php Ariana's work has received support from the New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ariana has also collaborated with other artists on various works including the dance and percussion group Jellyeye Drum Theater and with husband and filmmaker Monteith McCollum on feature-length award winning documentaries "Hybrid" and "Milk in the Land". http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/milk.html
Ariana Gerstein is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Email: mcger@binghamton.edu
http://www.thirtymilesfromanywhere.com
Associate Professor, Vincent Grenier, was born in Québec City, Canada. He has lived largely in the US. mostly New York City. In spite of this, he was a frequent contributor to the Montreal Art scene of the 70's and 80's as well as the SF bay areas in the early 70's. He has made experimental films since the early seventies when he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Grenier's films have been shown in the United States, Canada and Europe at showcases such as the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema and Cinéma Parallel in Montréal. His films and videos have earned him production grants from the Canada Council, and in New York State, from CAPS, NYFA, and ETC.
He has made over two dozen films and more recently videos, such as TABULA RASA (7.5 min. 2004), 2nd prize Media City Festival, Windsor, Canada; Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival and Onion Film & Video Festival, HERE (6.5 min, 2002) Awarded Gold for best Experimental film, New York Film Expo, COLOR STUDY (4.5 min, 2000) Rotterdam Film festival, London and Toronto Film Festivals , Lincoln Center, Second prize at the Black Maria Film Festival and MATERIAL INCIDENTS, (6 min. 2001), Rotterdam Film Festival. & New York Video Festival, FEET (27 min., video, 1994) won second prize at the 1995 Black Maria Festival and was shown in the WNET series Reel NY. His films include: OUT IN THE GARDEN (1991)--Best Documentary, 1992 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Experimental Documentary, 16th Atlanta Film/Video Festival, shown on WNET and London Film Festival; YOU (1990)--Black Maria Festival; TIME'S WAKE--(1987) Prize Winner Black Maria Festival; INTERIEUR INTERIORS (1978)--Prize Winner, San Francisco Are institute Film Festival; WORLD IN FOCUS (1976) Second Prize Winner, Ann Arbor Film Festival; and WINDOW WIND CHIMES (1974)-- Prize Winner, Bellevue Film Festival in Oregon. Seven of his films & videos were curated in the Whitney Museum of American Art 1970-2000 American Century Film program. Films by Grenier are included in the Donell media library in NYC, the National Film Archive, Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, AGO, Toronto and at many other institutions in Canada and the US.
Grenier has been active as a film programmer throughout his career, notably, at the Canyon Cinematheque in San Francisco and the Collective for Living Cinema in NYC. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Adelphi University, and Ithaca College.
Website: www.vincentgrenier.com
Email: vgrenier@binghamton.edu
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ken Jacobs, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker's co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens. In 1969, after a week's guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he was "a natural." Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system's first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin's DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley's series of Conversations With History.
Website: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations.
Joyce Jesionowski received her PhD in cinema studies from Columbia University and is the author of Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith's Biograph Films (University of California Press). She has served in various decanal capacities in New York City and for the past seven years has been a part of "The Griffith Project," the production of a multi-volume collection of essays on all of D.W. Griffiith's films and published by University of California Press for the British Film Institute, in association with Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Italy.
Email: jesionow@binghamton.edu
Brian Wall completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario, reading Samuel Beckett's plays for radio, television and film through Theodor Adorno's dialectic of the modernist work of art and the culture industry. His primary research areas include critical theory-particularly that of Adorno and Benjamin-and the historical avant garde (in a variety of media); and his current project entails tracing the many ways in which spirit and junk come to be allegorized, represented and embodied in film. Other research interests include film noir, German Expressionism and Weimar cinema, paracinema, Marxism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. He has published articles on Beckett, Bataille, The Big Lebowski and Buffy, among others.
Email: bwall@binghamton.edu
Benjamin Gerdes received his BA from Brown University's Program in Modern Culture and Media, completed the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and is currently an MFA candidate in Hunter College's Integrated Media Arts program. Informed by questions of documentary reference and traditions such as experimental film and video or conceptual photography, his practice includes work in those media alongside writing, curating, and organizing. He frequently works in collaboration with other artists, activists, theorists, and musicians. Presently this mode of shared process includes work as part of 16 Beaver Group, and in the past has included projects with the groups CAMEL and Friends of William Blake. His work has been included in film festivals and exhibitions internationally, including the New York Underground Film Festival, Kiasma Musuem of Modern Art (Helsinki), the Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School University (New York), and Artists' Space (New York). He is the recipient of numerous residencies, including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Woolworth Building Workspace Residency and the LMCC Swing Space Residency, and recent grants from the Jerome Foundation and NYSCA/The Experimental Television Center.
Email: bgerdes@binghamton.edu
Monteith McCollum is an independent filmmaker, musician and educator who has taught at various schools in Chicago, Illinois and upstate New York such as Columbia College, Broome Community College and Ithaca College. He has been a visiting artist at colleges including Boston Museum School, Art Institute of Chicago and University of Iowa. As director of the feature documentary "Hybrid", Monteith has traveled extensively showing his work and speaking about film.. In 2002 he was selected to tour on the Southern Circuit where he showed work and toured to Universities and high schools in the South. Monteith has served as a juror at various film festivals including the Bermuda International Film Festival, Slamdance, Ann Arbor, and Big Muddy at the University of Illinois. Since 2002 he has served as an advisory board member in film for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Monteith McCollums films have received much recognition. Hybrid was shown nationally on PBS and Arte in France. It also garnered many awards, in 2003 it received the IFP/Direct TV truer than fiction Spirit Award in Los Angeles Ca, and in 2002 he received the prestigious NYFA prize. Other honors include over a dozen best of festival awards at San Francisco International, Amsterdam Documentary Festival, Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Bermuda, Nashville, South by Southwest, and Amsterdam International Documentary Festival to name a few. Recently his new short Lawn was shown in the Museum of Modern Arts Premieres series, as well others including Black Maria, Ann Arbor and the European Media Arts Festival. Lawn is currently being shown on PBS as part of the P.O.V. series.
Monteith is currently working on a documentary feature titled "A Different Path". This work in progress has received support from New York State council on the Arts in the area of film and New York Foundation for The Arts in the are of sound.
Email: thirtymilesfromanywhere@yahoo.com
http://www.thirtymilesfromanywhere.com
Tomonari Nishikawa started filmmaking in 2001 at SUNY Binghamton, where he received his BA in Cinema and Philosophy. His films have been screened at film festivals, including New York Film Festival, Media City Experimental Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and Berlinale. His film, Market Street, which was commissioned by Exploratorium, won Film Award at EXiS: Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, South Korea.
While pursuing his MFA in Filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute, Nishikawa started making film installations using pinhole techniques, and such works have been exhibited at San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Still Motion in Toronto, and Headlands Center for the Arts. One of his installations, Building 945, received the 2008 Museum of Contemporary Cinema Grant.
Since 2006, Nishikawa began to curate screening programs. He works as a guest adviser/curator of Yebisu International Festival for Arts and Alternative Visions in Tokyo, and he is one of the co-founders and co-directors of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival in Malaysia, which will have its first festival in 2010.
Nishikawa is a recipient of 2008-09 Asian Public Intellectual Fellowship from The Nippon Foundation, spending one year in Malaysia and Thailand to research about experimental and personal cinema in the region. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Canyon Cinema, a distribution company of experimental films in San Francisco.
Website: www.tomonarinishikawa.com
Email: tomonarinishikawa@gmail.com
