Ghosts Of Future Pasts

Contributor Bios:

Kirsten Johnson is one of premier American documentary directors and cinematographers working today. Her film’s “Dick Jonson Is Dead” and "Cameraperson" premiered at Sundance 2016 and her short "The Above" premiered at 2015 New York Film Festival. Her work as a cinematographer appears in Oscar-winning "Citizen Four," Academy Award-nominated, "The Invisible War," Tribeca winner, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," "Fahrenheit 9/11", Academy Award-nominated "Asylum," "This Film is Not Yet Rated," "Derrida,’” and many more.

Jeanie Finlay is one of Britain’s most distinctive documentary makers, telling intimate stories to international audiences. Whether inviting audience behind the scenes of Teesside’s last record shop in her home town (SOUND IT OUT), uncovering a rollercoaster Nashive fable (BIFA winning Orion The Man Who WOuld Be King), to share the extraordinary journey of a British transgender man, pregnant with his child (BIFA nominated Seahorse) or onto the set of the world’s biggest television show (Emmy nominated Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch), all of Jeanie's films are all made with the same steel and heart, sharing an empathetic approach to bringing overlooked and untold stories to the screen. www.jeaniefinlay.com 

Steven Sheil is a writer and filmmaker based in Nottingham, UK. His work has previously appeared in Black Static, Horla, The Ghastling and as part of the Black Library anthology Invocations. His first feature Mum & Dad was released by Revolver in 2008. His second feature Dead Mine, will be released by eOne later in the year. He also one of the co-directors of Nottingham’s Mayhem Film Festival.

Courtney Stephens is a non-fiction and experimental filmmaker based in Los Angeles Her recent feature, The American Sector, (made with Pacho Velez) documents fragments of the Berlin Wall installed as monuments around the US. The American Sector, was named one of the best films of 2020 by The New Yorker.

Danny Paul Grody is a solo musician and founding member of San Francisco based bands Tarentel and The Drift. His first solo album Fountain was released in 2010 on Root Strata. 2013 saw the release of his critically acclaimed third album, Between Two Worlds (Three Lobed Recordings), and the following year Danny self-released, Furniture Music. His latest full-length, Other States (2016), was released by Geographic North for their excellently-curated Sketch for Winter IV series. In addition to his solo and collaborative work, Danny also composes music for film. Most recently, he contributed music for the documentary film, The Gospel of Eureka (2018), written and directed by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri. His work can also found on the award-winning documentary, October Country (also directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher), which garnered a “Best Musical Score” at the Cinema Eye Honors in NYC.

Mark Elijah Rosenberg  is a writer and filmmaker. He wrote and directed Approaching the Unknown (Paramount Pictures, 2016), a philosophical sci-fi film about exploring the limits of human experience in order to appreciate that the mysteries of the universe will always be ineffable. Mark directed, co-produced and created the story for Year Million (National Geographic, 2018), a six-hour fiction / documentary hybrid mini-series about the effects of technology on the future of humanity. Mark is also the Founder and former Artistic Director of Rooftop Films, a non-profit film festival and grantmaking organization based in Brooklyn. markelijahrosenberg.com

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Stephen Christopher Quinn is an artist, naturalist and author who has spent a lifetime exploring the natural world and working in a career at the intersection of art and science. Quinn worked as an artist in the Exhibition Department of the American Museum of Natural History for 39 years. He is the author of Windows on Nature, a lovely behind-the-scenes look at the magic of the museum dioramas. https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Nature-Habitat-Dioramas-American/dp/0810959402   stephencquinn.com

Elliot PDS-70b Skaff loves dogs, flashlights, reading, climbing furniture, playing music, and chasing his parents around the dining room with “yogurt fingers.” He enjoyed his first trip to the American Museum of Natural History. 

Matt McCormick is a Spokane, Washington based video installation artist and filmmaker.[1] His work extends documentary and experimental filmmaking, focusing on the sublime decay of contemporary culture and the landscape both urban and rural. McCormick is an artist and filmmaker who works in both the art and independent film worlds. He has had three films screen at the Sundance Film Festival, has had work exhibited at Art Basel, Moscow Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art, and his film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal was named in ‘Top 10 film lists of 2002’ in both Art Forum Magazine and The Village Voice. He has also directed music videos for The Shins, Broken Bells, Sleater-Kinney, and Yacht, while also collaborating on projects with artists such as Miranda July, James Mercer, Patton Oswalt, and Calvin Johnson.

Lynne Tillman  is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She writes a bi-monthly column "In These Intemperate Times" for Frieze art magazine.

Jennifer Reeder is an artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away (2014) was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category. In 2003 she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, As With Knives and Skin. Her films have screened at the Whitney Biennial; The New York Video Festival; Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria; the Gene Siskel Film Center; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; the Wexner Center for the Arts; the Chicago Underground Film Festival; and the 48th International Venice Biennial.

Nancy Andrews makes films, drawings, props and objects. She works in hybrid forms combining storytelling, documentary, animation, puppetry, and research. Her characters and narratives are synthesized from various sources, including history, movies, popular educational materials and autobiography. Her work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art (2011, 2006, 2004, 2003, 2000), Anthology Film Archives (2010), REDCAT Los Angeles (2011) Pacific Film Archive (2006, 2005,2000) Gene Siskel Film Center (2004), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Flaherty Seminar (2006, 2012), Maine International Film Festival, (2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009,2011), Nova Cinema Bioscoop, Brussels (2007), Jerusalem Film Festival (2000), and Taiwan International Animation Festival (2007), among others.

Jason Hanasik is a filmmaker, artist, curator and journalist. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, at various international film festivals and in visual art exhibitions worldwide. His most recent film "A Childhood On Fire" is also available through The

Gaurdian.

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Holland Andrews is an American vocalist, composer, and performance artist whose work is based on emotionality in its many forms. In their composition work, Andrews focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, Andrews arranges music with voice, clarinet, and electronics, harnessing the innate qualities of these instruments’ power and elegance to serve as a vessel for these themes. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range of musical stylings including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while also cultivating their own unique vocal style which integrates these influences with language disintegration and vocal distortion. Andrews previously performed solo music under the stage name Like A Villain. https://www.hollandandrews.com

Cliff Hengst is an artist and performer, with a BFA from SFAI and current teaching position in the SFAI grad program. Hengst’s one-man play, "Mr. Akita" was recently performed at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Matrix program. He has exhibited his work at SFMOMA, Southern Exposure, The San Francisco Arts Commission and Gallery 16 in San Francisco. Hengst has performed and exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, Machine Project in Los Angeles and The Tang Museum at Skidmore College in New York, and most recently at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Nels Bangerter is an award-winning documentary film editor. His work includes “CAMERAPERSON,” the critically-acclaimed winner of Cinema Eye Honors and International Documentary Association Best Editing awards as well as Cinema Eye's Outstanding Feature and grand jury awards for best documentary at San Francisco International Film Festival, Sheffield, Camden, and Montclair; “LET THE FIRE BURN”, Independent Spirit Awards' Truer Than Fiction Award winner, and winner of Best Editing awards from the IDA, Cinema Eye, and Tribeca Film Festival; Netflix's “DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD,” winner of Sundance's Special Jury Award for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling; Independent Lens' New York Times Critic's Pick “THE HOTTEST AUGUST;” HBO's “VERY SEMI-SERIOUS,” News and Documentary Emmy winner and SFIFF award winner; “KUMU HINA”, winner of the GLAAD Media Award for Best Documentary and PBS’s Independent Lens Audience Award; and “WAR CHILD”, which premiered at Berlin and won Tribeca’s Audience Award. Nels edited the Sundance short documentary “PROJECT X,” directed by Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke and starring Michelle Williams and Rami Malek. He has been nominated twice for News and Documentary editing Emmys.

D.L. Alvarez  is inspired by queer politics, Bauhaus assemblage and classic “slasher” films. Often highly conceptual, Alvarez’ drawings and installation works are intelligently macabre, delving into critical complexities of race, sexuality and social structure. In one such series, the artist renders elaborate, constructed horse costumes, hung on the wall, adorned in small sweaters, or rendered in anatomically correct plastic.  Alvarez has exhibited consistently in New York City and abroad since the mid-1990s, including shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, Derek Eller Gallery, NY, Kunsthaus, Dresden, Germany, Galeria Casado Santapau, Madrid and Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. Group shows include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The Drawing Center, New York, The Whitney Museum, New York, New Museum, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. 

Chanti Darling (Chanticleer Trü) would like you to know that “RNB ain’t no joke.” As frontman of Portland, OR retrofuturist electro-soul adepts Chanti Darling, Trü drinks deeply from the sacred founts of Disco, Boogie Funk, and the dizzying universe of house music. Teasing out the essential filaments, Trü weaves a sound that nods to the past as it blasts into the future; urgent, irresistible, and absolutely of the moment. 

The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions. https://publicdomainreview.org

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Johanna Jackson is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist who works in drawing, painting, animation, fibers, ceramics, and more.  Jackson emerged from the late 90s San Francisco-based scene known to many as the Mission School. Her work often combines multiple handmade objects, paintings, and texts into immersive three-dimensional environments.  johannajackson.com

Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher are a collaborative filmmaking/multimedia team. Their first feature as directors OCTOBER COUNTRY won the Grand Jury Prize at Silverdocs, received two Cinema Eye Honors, and was nominated for a 2009 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. The film is a haunting portrait of American poverty, described by A.O. Scott as a “Joyce Carol Oates novel rendered as a documentary.” Their most recent feature film  "THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA" premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, was released theatrically by Kino Lorber, and broadcast on POVin 2020.  Palmieri and Mosher  have worked in live cinema, performing at the First Look Festival at the Museum Of The Moving Image and collaborating with Daniel Lanois, Pop-Up Magazine, and others. They score their own films and perform their soundtracks  as live accompaniments. Palmieri’s music video director credits includes work for Sharon Van Etten, Beck, The Strokes, and The Foo Fighters. Mosher's writing can be found at Failed States Journal, Talk House, and other publications.