Filmatic Festival 2014

Rebecca Webb, Film Curator, ArtPower
ArtPower Film curator Rebecca Webb has worn many hats in the world of film production and new media, such as editor, producer, location scout, and post-production supervisor. Webb has worked on documentaries and feature films with directors William Klein, Darren Arronofsky and Hal Hartley, to name a few. Webb is especially interested in digital technology and how it is shaping next-gen film going and making experiences. In 2014, she is inaugurating the Filmatic Festival, a digitally-diverse festival that aims to blur the line between audience and artist. Webb also lectures in film production media and photography at UC San Diego. Her fine art photography work is exhibited in galleries in Boston, New York City, San Diego and various museums nationwide.

Brian Goldfarb, Associate Professor, UCSD Communication Department
Brian Goldfarb is Associate Professor of Communication at UCSD. His research and creative production focus on visual/digital culture, disability and education. His book, Visual Pedagogy, considers media technologies used in the 20th century to advance models of pedagogy in the US and globally. Goldfarb’s current projects include Global Tourette, a documentary and media exchange project engaging cultural and professional responses to Tourette Syndrome internationally; and, Carescape, a digital book exploring patient communities in the digital age. As a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (1993-97) he organized exhibitions such as alt.youth.media and initiated their online programming.

Brian Hu, Artistic Director, San Diego Asian Film Festival
Brian Hu is the Artistic Director of Pacific Arts Movement, presenters of the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Previously, he was the co-editor of Asia Pacific Arts, an online magazine published through the UCLA Asia Institute and later the USC US-China Institute. Brian received his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA, where, with the help of a Fulbright grant, he completed a dissertation on cosmopolitanism and cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan. His writings on film have been published in journals such as Screen, Velvet Light Trap, and Senses of Cinema. He has lectured on film around the world and teaches at the University of San Diego.

Neil Kendricks, Freelance Film Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Neil Kendricks is a San Diego-based artist, filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator and the Film Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). Kendricks’ first solo photography exhibition, Bruised Eye Candy was shown at San Diego’s Spacecraft gallery in February 2008 and his photography and artwork have also been exhibited in such arts institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art, the African-American Museum of Fine Arts, and London’s Royal College of Art, among others.

Kendricks is currently working on his first, feature-length documentary, Comics Are Everywhere, which explores select artists working in the pop-cultural intersection where alternative comics, animation and the Art World collide. Kendricks is one of the 10 innovative San Diego artists selected for the 2013-2014 Creative Catalyst Fund/ Individual Artist’s Fellowship and his documentary-in-progress was featured in a cover story in The San Diego Union-Tribune in July 2011. His award-winning short films like 2002′s Loop have screened at such international film festivals as the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, the Havana Film Festival, and a special short-film screening at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s American Pavilion, and elsewhere.

Kendricks’ writing on film and the arts have been published in such publications as The San Diego Union-Tribune, Art Ltd. magazine, Moviemaker magazine, Art Weekmagazine, and numerous other publications. Many of his articles are available online. In addition to his film and art practice, Kendricks teaches at San Diego State University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Southwestern Community College’s School of Arts & Communication; the Art Institute of California, San Diego, and the New School of Architecture & Design. He is also the founder and ongoing participant of alt.pictureshows, a popular short-film festival that ran from 2003 to 2012 at MCASD and now finds a new venue at UCSD in 2014.

Trish Stone, Digital media artist, Tour Director and Gallery Coordinator for Qualcomm Institute, UCSD

Trish Stone is a new media artist, whose conceptual art projects deal with issues of surveillance and intimacy. For the Filmatic Festival, she has selected a one hour program of 4K artworks made by UCSD faculty, staff, and students. These artworks employ a variety of strategies which challenge the notion of traditional film, including algorithmic computation, high resolution digital film techniques, live performance, and found footage.

Alan White

2014 7th Annual Up&Coming Jury Member

Born in London and raised in Australia, LA based Alan White most recently directed the Lionsgate thriller Reclaim, starring John Cusack, Ryan Phillippe, Jacki Weaver, and Rachelle Lefevre, scheduled for late 2014 release. Currently, he is in post-production for the feature length documentary Westerly chronicling surf icon Peter Drouyn and his controversial metamorphosis into Westerly Windina. Beau Willimon (House of Cards/Ides of March) is producing.

Alan has directed two critically acclaimed Australian films, Erskineville Kings starring Hugh Jackman and Joel Edgerton, and Risk, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, starring Bryan Brown, Jason Clarke, and Claudia Karvan. As a director of commercials and music videos be has won every major international advertising award from the Cannes Lions to CLIOs and was the first director to win an Emmy for “Outstanding TV Commercial.”  Alan is partnered with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) in the innovative and highly regarded production house Bob Industries.

Amy Alexander
Amy Alexander is an artist working in computing, video and audiovisual performance. Her background is in filmmaking, information technology, and music. She is Associate Professor at UC San Diego. Her work takes place in a variety of settings: in festivals and museums as well as in nightclubs, on the street and on the Internet.

Andy Muehlhausen
Andy Muehlhausen is a creator of interactive installations, creating spaces for truly meaningful human-to-human interactions that fully embrace the technology of our times. Most of his pieces incorporate multiple displays, multiple users, physical interaction, social environments, surround sound, and computer vision. He graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Purdue, and is currently in his final year of the Theatre (Sound Design) M.F.A. program at UCSD.

Ava Porter

Ava Porter is a photographer, installation artist, and experimental filmmaker. She has worked in film for over 10 years. Her art attempts to analyze the overlooked influences and exploited bystanders of Western popular (entertainment, religious, and war) culture, vis-a-vis the history of aggression and theories of embodied cognition. To reinforce her content, she usually presents film and photographic works as large-scale installations, through which viewers must walk and therefore acknowledge their own physicality. Recent examples include Slaughter, Ima, The Vessel, which all investigate the contemporary role of the adult woman in modern society as seen through its traditional, religious precursors.

WaSo Collective is a collaborative duo with Ava Porter, a Visual Arts MFA student, and Yvette Janine Jackson, a Ph.D. student in the Music Integrative Studies program.

Together they create immersive cinema that encourages audiences to reexamine their positions within contemporary society. WaSo debuted Lost at Space4Art on September 27, 2013 as part of the Glottalopticon outdoor experimental opera series.

Bobby Boermans

At 15, Boermans received the MTV Home Music Video Award, and his filmmaking career had begun. He attended the Dutch Film Academy (NFTA), where he studied editing, and went on to attend the prestigious American Film Institute (AFI), studying directing under the guidance of Michael Mann, David Fincher, Luc Besson, Christopher Nolan, and George Lucas. In 2011, he directed Claustrofobia, the first Dutch feature film made especially for an online release. He’s also won a MOBO Award for best Urban Video. His combined music video work has gained more than 50 million hits to date on YouTube.

Brian Cross

New UCSD Visual Arts faculty Brian Cross ( Photographer, director/cinematographer, book author) kicks off the Filmatic Festival with his brave ideas about the future of filmmaking and film-going. Through the lens of hiphop, Cross orients a number of conversations, multi-generational interchanges, rhythmic confluences that weave through the diaspora of African musical traditions in the Americas. Party on with a live Vmix performance by one of the original turntablists, J. Rocc (founder of the Beat Junkies) with video by Cross. See a musical film performed in a way you could never have imagined.

Dan Sandin

Daniel J. Sandin is an internationally recognized pioneer of electronic art and visualization. In 1969 Sandin developed a computer-controlled light and sound environment called Glow Flow at the Smithsonian Institution and was invited to join the art faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) the same year. He is Director Emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at UIC and an emeritus professor in the School of Art and Design at UIC. As an artist, he has exhibited worldwide. His video animation “Spiral PTL”, produced with Tom DeFanti, is in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1991 Sandin and DeFanti conceived and developed, in collaboration with graduate students, the CAVE Virtual Reality (VR) theater. In recent years, Sandin has been concentrating on perfecting the design of the CAVE and its derivatives and creating networked VR hardware and software systems. He continues to work with EVL and Tom DeFanti at Qualcomm Institute at UCSD to create content in the VR medium for exhibition in museums and galleries.

David Michalek

David Michalek is an artist who takes the concepts and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While studying English Literature at UCLA, he began to work as a studio assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. In 1991, he began his professional photographic career and worked regularly as a portrait artist for many publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Michalek began incorporating and augmenting his work as a portrait artist with performance, installation, and interdisciplinary projects. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments and St. François d’Assise. Michalek’s installations, mixedmedia projects and public art have been shown nationally and internationally, including at Lincoln Center Festival, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles Music Center, Paris’ Bastille Opera, Venice Biennale, Sadler’s Wells, Luminato Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Yale University, and The Kitchen. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. For more information on David Michalek andPortraits in Dramatic Time, visit davidmichalek.net/portraits.

David Peterson

David J. Peterson earned BAs in English and Linguistics from UC Berkeley and an MA in Linguistics from UC San Diego. He’s been creating languages recreationally since 2000, since 2009 has been creating languages for Hollywood. His television and film credits include Game of Thrones (2011), Defiance (2013), Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Star-Crossed (2014).

Ed Ghost Tucker

Ed Ghost Tucker will be playing a gorgeous acoustic set at the 7th Annual Up&Coming Student Film Festival reception! Join us for live music and tasty treats! FREE!

Ed Ghost Tucker is a four-piece Indie/World/Pop group from San Diego that blends three-part vocal harmonies over melodic instrumentation and eclectic rhythms. They have been described as ‘art-rock,’ ‘psychedelic folk-jazz,’ and ‘eclectic, world-influenced pop’ á la Paul Simon, Grizzly Bear, and Vampire Weekend.

Emily Grenader

Emily Grenader grew up in Houston, Texas and moved to New York City in 2003 to earn her BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She arrived in La Jolla in 2011 where she is currently an MFA candidate in the Visual Art Department at UCSD.

Emily uses various mediums to combine individuals into “crowd portraits,” exploring human connections from many perspectives. Projects from her most recent crowd series have won the Lawndale Big Show’s Juror Prize, and Kickstarter’s “Best Art Project” award. Recently, she has collaborated with engineers Nadir Weibel, Danilo Gasquez Rodriguez, and Fernando Nos to create projects that deal with human-computer-interaction, and her team presented in the 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Emily has recently shown work at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library and is featured as the launch artist in the 2014 ART SAN DIEGO fair.

J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie D. Cohn

Libbie D. Cohn studied modern China, film, and architecture at Yale University. She has lived and traveled widely in China since infancy.

J.P. Sniadecki is a filmmaker and a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Harvard University. His films have received numerous awards, including the 2009 Joris Ivens Award at the Cinema du Reel Film Festival for CHAIQIAN (DEMOLITION), and two Leopards at the 63rd Locarno Film Festival for FOREIGN PARTS, which he co-directed with Verena Paravel. J.P. is also founder and co-curator of Emergent Visions, a film series that screens new independent cinema from the People’s Republic of China.

Michael Trigilio

Michael Trigilio is a multimedia artist living in San Diego. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, he received his B.A. in Humanities from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His fear of religion notwithstanding, he was ordained as a lay-ordained priest in the Zen Buddhist Tiep Hien Order in 1997, a role from which he resigned five years later. He received his M.F.A. from Mills College in 2003. His works in film, sound, performance, and tactical-media have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and San Francisco’s Dancers’ Group.

Michael’s collaborative public-media project Neighborhood Public Radio (with artists Lee Montgomery and Jon Brumit) was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2007 and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles in 2011. Current collaborative projects include Project Planetaria, a UCSD Center for Humanities research-group with astrophysicist Adam Burgasser and artist Tara Knight focused on interpreting stellar-data through performance, sound, and media-work. Additionally, Michael was awarded a CSRO Award from Calit2 to direct the Socially Engaged Speculative Media Initiative (SESMI), investigating the means by which we understand our mundane experience through the lens of unknown millennial futures.

Michael is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego and where he teaches courses in Media Arts.

Nadir Weibel

Nadir Weibel is riginally from the southern and Italian part of Switzerland (Ticino) where he completed all the basic schools. He hold a master in Computer Science and Engineering from ETH Zurich, where he also completed my Ph.D. in Summer 2009. He joined the University of California San Diego in October 2009, as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Distributed Cognition and Human Computer Interaction Lab. He moved into the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD and the VA San Diego Health Systems in 2012.

Nitzan Ben Shaul

Professor of Film and Television Studies and former Acting Head of the Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD from the Cinema Studies Dept. at New York University. Nitzan has published extensively on film, television and new media in leading journals and has written several books including Film: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2007), Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (Rodopi, 2008), and Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies (Berghahn, 2012). He has received grants to carry out research projects related to the effects of computerization on film and television and was the co-creator and director of Turbulence (2009), a hyper-narrative interactive movie based on a novel model he developed.

Scott Gibson

Scott Gibson age 48, full time photography since 1993.

Scott started his full time career in photography shooting weddings like many photographers, and would eventually spend over half his Saturdays shooting over 600 wedding in the following years. However, he always worked to diversify his photography skills into other areas during the week. He bought a postcard company and grew it into a large souvenir distributing company, and also expanded into restaurant,real estate and corporate photography.

The postcard and real estate photography made aerial photography a profitable niche for Scott and he became the busiest aerial photographer in his area, and in 2003 he began experimenting with radio control aerial photography and was among the first photographers anywhere to lift a camera with a multirotor platform.

In recent years, after building and experimenting with dozens of machines over thousands of hours, Scott has grown his aerial photography for multiple applications including real estate, stock photography, large group shots, location scouting and corporate work, and conducts workshops on RC photography with an emphasis on safety and common sense while using this new technology.

Shahrokh Yadegari

Shahrokh Yadegari, composer, sound designer, and producer, has collaborated with such artists as Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff, Ann Hamilton, Christine Brewer, Gabor Tompa, Maya Beiser, Steven Schick, David Schweiszer, Lucie Tiberghien, Hossein Omoumi, and Siamak Shajarian. He has performed and his productions, compositions, and designs have been presented internationally in such venues as the Carnegie Hall, Festival of Arts and Ideas, OFF-D’Avignon Festival, International Theatre Festival in Cluj, Romania, Ravinia Festival, Ruhr-Triennale, Vienna Festival, Holland Festival, Forum Barcelona, Japan America Theatre, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Institut fur Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Darmstadt), Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, and Contemporary Museum of Art, San Diego.

Tara Knight

William Nericcio

Yvette Janine Jackson

Together they create immersive cinema that encourages audiences to reexamine their positions within contemporary society. WaSo debuted Lost at Space4Art on September 27, 2013 as part of the Glottalopticon outdoor experimental opera series.

Ava Porter

Ava Porter is a photographer, installation artist, and experimental filmmaker. She has worked in film for over 10 years. Her art attempts to analyze the overlooked influences and exploited bystanders of Western popular (entertainment, religious, and war) culture, vis-a-vis the history of aggression and theories of embodied cognition. To reinforce her content, she usually presents film and photographic works as large-scale installations, through which viewers must walk and therefore acknowledge their own physicality. Recent examples include Slaughter, Ima, The Vessel, which all investigate the contemporary role of the adult woman in modern society as seen through its traditional, religious precursors.

WaSo Collective is a collaborative duo with Ava Porter, a Visual Arts MFA student, and Yvette Janine Jackson, a Ph.D. student in the Music Integrative Studies program.

Together they create immersive cinema that encourages audiences to reexamine their positions within contemporary society. WaSo debuted Lost at Space4Art on September 27, 2013 as part of the Glottalopticon outdoor experimental opera series. 

Brian Cross

New UCSD Visual Arts faculty Brian Cross ( Photographer, director/cinematographer, book author) kicks off the Filmatic Festival with his brave ideas about the future of filmmaking and film-going. Through the lens of hiphop, Cross orients a number of conversations, multi-generational interchanges, rhythmic confluences that weave through the diaspora of African musical traditions in the Americas. Party on with a live Vmix performance by one of the original turntablists, J. Rocc (founder of the Beat Junkies) with video by Cross. See a musical film performed in a way you could never have imagined.

Daren Brabham
Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He was the first to publish scholarly research using the word “crowdsourcing” and has published more than a dozen influential academic articles defining crowdsourcing, examining the motivations of crowds, and predicting new applications of crowdsourcing in the public sector. He is the author of the book ‘Crowdsourcing’ (MIT Press, 2013) and leads the USC Crowd Lab, an interdisciplinary collective of researchers studying crowdsourcing and
crowdfunding.

David Michalek

David Michalek is an artist who takes the concepts and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While studying English Literature at UCLA, he began to work as a studio assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. In 1991, he began his professional photographic career and worked regularly as a portrait artist for many publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Michalek began incorporating and augmenting his work as a portrait artist with performance, installation, and interdisciplinary projects. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments and St. François d’Assise. Michalek’s installations, mixedmedia projects and public art have been shown nationally and internationally, including at Lincoln Center Festival, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles Music Center, Paris’ Bastille Opera, Venice Biennale, Sadler’s Wells, Luminato Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Yale University, and The Kitchen. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. For more information on David Michalek andPortraits in Dramatic Time, visit davidmichalek.net/portraits.

David Peterson

Nitzan Ben Shaul

Scott Gibson

Shlomo Dubnov

Tara Knight

Travis Sims

William Nericcio

Yvette Janine Jackson

Rajendra Roy