Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12
Jul 16, 2026 at 7:30 pm
A Brief History of Chasing Storms
With Curtis Miller & Julia Gunnison
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY
We’re delighted to present Curtis Miller’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS! The film presents a history of the tornado as both a destructive weather event and an American icon. Local monuments to past tornadoes intertwine with mythologies of settlement and displacement. An amateur storm chaser questions his own agency and fate. The CEO of a Wizard of Oz-themed storm shelter company describes a growing market in a world of increasing weather uncertainty. Unfolding episodically, questions of memory, inequality, colonization, climate change, and disaster capitalism arise as the film examines legacies of weather within the region colloquially known as “tornado alley.” Curtis will be present for a conversation following the screening with writer, editor and arts-worker, Julia Gunnison.
Come through!
Program
A Brief History of Chasing Storms
16mm and 4K video / 70 minutes
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
Curtis Miller is an artist and educator working across film, video, photography, and publication. His work often takes the American Midwest as both site and subject. His films have screened internationally at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Antimatter, Chicago International Film Festival, DMZ Documentary Festival, EXiS, IDFA, Mimesis Documentary Festival, and Visions du Réel, as well as the Hyde Park Arts Center, Indiana University Cinema, and the Renaissance Society, among others. Other venues for performance, printed matter, and installations include the Chicago Artist Book Fair, MdW Art Fair, College Arts Association, Gallery 400, Tiger Strikes Asteroid and various artist-run projects and spaces throughout the Midwest. He has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the City Colleges of Chicago, and most recently as lecturer for the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. In 2025, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
Julia Gunnison is a writer, editor, and arts worker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Film Comment, Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. Her interests include nonfiction film forms and urban space on screen.
She is a 2024–26 UNDO Fellow with UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. Through the fellowship, she is editing a book of essays in collaboration with filmmaker Courtney Stephens, to be published later this year. Julia is also an alumna of the 2024 Film at Lincoln Center Critics Academy and the 2023–24 Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop.
She is the co-founder and co-editor of Syllabus, a web publication for nontraditional syllabi that explores how a syllabus can become a creative tool.
She has served as a reviewer and juror for the Sundance Institute, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, the International Documentary Association, the Miller Foundation, and the Catapult Film Fund, among others, and has moderated Q+A’s at the IFC Center and UnionDocs.
From the Event
