Nestled just east of the Rocky Mountains, in the high plains desert of the Front Range, we find one of North America’s most vibrant experimental filmmaking communities. Dating back to the early 50’s with Bruce Connor and Stan Brakhage, the University of Colorado’s Film Studies program remains an important outpost in the American avant-garde. This rocky mountain enclave continues to churn out a fine cinematic terroir, cultivating filmmakers and an experimental film pedagogy that is envied across the nation. CU Boulder, as it is known, remains dedicated to nurturing daring works that probe both notions of what is cinema as well as ideas of how to engage in a documentary practice. This program showcases student and faculty works including films by David Gatten, Jeanne Liotta, Erin Espelie, Kelly Sears, Geoff Marslett, Andrew Busti, Sarah Biagini, Samantha Pollak and as well as curator Adam Sekuler.

Adam Sekuler is a filmmaker and curator living in Boulder Colorado. He served a decade as the program director of Northwest Film Forum in Seattle where he organized touring programs including a nineteen film Shohei Imamura retrospective. He also launched their film distribution program shepherding films by Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alsonso, Serge Bozon, Albert Serra, Valerie Massadian amongst others into the North American film market. Along with choreographer Shannon Stewart, he regularly tours dance film programs through their series Radar: Exchanges In Dance Film Frequencies. His films strike a delicate balance between stylization and naturalism, anchored within an observational world while creating a poetic and lyrical form of visual storytelling. His work has screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Walker Art Center, Seattle Art Museum, and dozens of other venues across the globe. In 2007, his short film Pathe Ballet won a prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

JEANNE LIOTTA makes films, videos, and other ephemera including installed projections, works on paper, and photographic works.

Her works encompass a constellation of mediums and interests often located at a lively intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy.

In 2011 Liotta was voted among the top filmmakers of the decade by Film Comment magazine, and in she 2012 received the Helen Hill award from the Orphans Film Symposium. In 2013 Anthology Film Archives held a retrospective of her work called THE REAL WORLD AT LAST BECOMES A MYTH, and she installed STEIN TIMES (2013) an altered Gertrude Stein poem in the windows of Gridspace Gallery, Bklyn. She also works with Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Bklyn.

In 2014 she collaborated on an art/science project with the NOAA, creating SOON (2014), a media work about climate change for a 360 degree screening platform which premiered at The Fiske Planetarium in Boulder CO .

Her works are exhibited internationally, including The New York and Rotterdam Film Festivals, The 2006 Whitney Biennial, The 2013 Sharjah Biennial, The Centres George Pompidou, The Cinematheque Francais, The Arthouse/ Jones Center in Austin, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, The Wexner Center for the Art in Ohio, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the Cornell Astronomical Society amongst other venues.

For 17 years she was the creative force behind Firefly Cinema, a community garden microcinema curated from the 16mm collection at The New York Public Library, and she also maintains ongoing research and lectures on The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

She has taught widely and variously over the years, and is presently Assistant Professor in Film Studies at The University of Colorado Boulder, as well as Film/Video faculty for the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.