Natalia Almada’s video documentary Al Otro Lado | To the Other Side was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Almada uses corrido music, a style of troubadour balladry, to trace the contemporary stories of exchange across the Mexican and U.S. border. The music narrates as workers, drugs and culture move between the two countries. Almada was also awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Award. (Mexico)

Gregg Araki’s The Living End and Smiley Face were both shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of their Sundance Institute at BAM screening series. The Living End, Araki’s breakthrough 1992 film which turns the buddy movie inside out, was recently completely remastered. In the slapstick comedy Smiley Face, a woman inadvertently eats her roommate's pot cupcakes and embarks upon a strange day filled with surreal misadventures. Araki was present for a post-screening discussion of The Living End, and provided an introduction for Smiley Face.

Iván Ávila’s La Sangre Iluminada | Enlightened Blood was shown in the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In this narrative feature, six seemingly unrelated strangers experience a phenomenon that literally alters their lives. Through an aberration of time and space, their lives link and a strange transformation takes place. (Mexico)

Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up on Mu had its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, followed by a screening in Cinevegas. This narrative feature follows the intertwined lives of Jack Parson, inventor of rocket fuel; Marjorie Cameron, new age sex leader; and L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer–turned–Scientology founder.

Nanobah Becker participated in Tribeca All Access program, with her Fellowship-funded project FULL. This narrative follows a young gay Navajo man forced to return home to the queer Native American nightlife culture of Albuquerque, New Mexico after failing as a disc jockey in New York City.

James Benning’s Casting a Glance was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival. This film captures the ever-changing grandeur of the Spiral Jetty, a giant earthwork created by artist Robert Smithson in 1970 at Utah's Great Salt Lake.

Hartmut Bitomsky’s Staub was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival and San Francisco International Film Festival, as well as at SilverDocs. This feature documentary rhapsodizes about dust, which is everywhere, ever present and will not go away.

Andrew Blubaugh’s The Pull was shown at Hot Docs, Portland’s Filmed by Bike and PDX Film Fest, as well as in the Edinburgh Film Festival and the 20th edition of Newfest. Blubaugh’s latest work employs bicycle metaphors, candid discussion and illustrative re-enactments while telling about a romantic relationship and its particular terms.

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s A Lion in the House was featured in The Council on Foundations’ 41st Film & Video Festival, where it was a 2008 Henry Hampton Award winner. Their feature documentary follows five families of diverse racial and economic backgrounds whose children are battling cancer.

St. Clair Bourne was honored at the 10th San Francisco Black Film Festival, which took place in June, when a retrospective screening was presented in tribute to the late Fellow. A special program of Bourne’s work was be shown, including excerpts from his films and the features Let the Church Say Amen and Paul Robeson: Here I Stand.  In April, the Tribeca Film Festival, also paid tribute to Bourne when filmmaker William Greaves shared a few words about him and showed highlights from some of Bourne's films.

Arlene Bowman’s The Graffiti was shown in the Talking Stick Film Festival.  In this short narrative, a woman rebounds from injustice by writing about racist graffiti targeting Indians and sprayed throughout Vancouver.

Michael Paul Britto contributed work to the group show Homebase III, in which seventeen international artists transformed a historical townhouse in Harlem with site-specific artwork addressing the notion of Home. Homebase III was exhibited in April and May.

Tony Buba's Ode to a Steeltown was awarded a Jury's Citation for Second Prize by the 27th Black Maria Film Festival, and was included in the festival's nationwide tour. This short documentary continues a lifelong commitment by Buba to document the fate of his hometown, Braddock. Buba questions residents of this blighted rustbelt town, interspersing footage of their answers with contrasting images of contemporary Braddock and those from its former prosperity.

Christiane Burkhard’s Trazando Aleida | Tracing Aleida was included in the traveling documentary showcase Ambulante: Gira de documentales 2008, a film festival that toured Mexico with 42 screenings in a number of cities from February to April. Her film follows a Mexican woman who reunites with her brother for the first time since their adoption by different families, after their parents’ disappearance during Mexico’s “dirty war” in 1975. (Mexico)

Charles Burnett’s Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation was shown in the 15th New York African Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in April. Burnett’s latest narrative film follows the legend of Samuel Nujoma, Namibia’s first president and a prominent leader in the struggle for independence from apartheid South Africa.

Jim Campbell's 1st and San Fernando was included in the 01SJ Festival, in the biennial exhibition Superlight. This installation consists of two grids displaying extremely low resolution video images that are best deciphered by looking at them from a distance. Campbell also presents his Home Movies at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, exhibited through June and July. In this mural-scale installation, LED lights are strung from ceiling to floor in a grid, projecting imagery from amateur family films in a way that obscures their representative qualities and highlights their emotional impact.

Vincent Carelli’s body of work was featured in the National Museum of the American Indian’s series Amazônia Indígena: A View from the Villages, which was screened in New York and Washington D.C. in May.  The series showcased productions by indigenous videomakers from Brazil’s Amazon.  Six of Carelli’s videos, including his Fellowship-funded Meeting Ancestors were shown, and Carelli was present to participate in discussions after the screenings.  Other titles screened were We Gather as a Family, The Spirit of TV, Iauarete: Waterfall of the Jaguars, a work-in-progress of They Shoot Indians, Don't They? and the world premiere of Back to the Good Land. Much of Carelli’s earlier pieces, including Meeting Ancestors, documented points of contact made between Amazonian tribes, while his more recent work has investigated cultural and physical attacks made upon these tribes over the last thirty years. (Brazil)

Daniel Carrera’s Primera Comunion | First Communion was shown in the Talking Stick Film Festival.  In this short narrative, a young outsider is confronted with the harsh rituals of a rural Mexican pueblo where cruelty underlies street life and Catholicism alike.

Patty Chang spoke about her work and issues in the contemporary art world, at the Guggenheim Museum, as a finalist for The Hugo Boss Prize 2008. Chang's early performance pieces, which often tested the limits of endurance and taste, and her more recent video and photographic projects have focused on the conflation of the real and the imagined in various cultural contexts.

Seoungho Cho’s I Left My Silent House was awarded the 27th Black Maria Film Festival's Grand Prize for "Best of Festival - Experimental," and was included in the festival's nationwide tour. This experimental short captures a pulsing, kinetic, abstract impression of city subways.

Chris Choy’s Long Story Short was shown in the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.  In this documentary, actor Jodi Long goes in search of footage from the Ed Sullivan show in 1959, when her parents performed as the comedy team Larry and Trudie Leung.

Jem Cohen’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival and New York Underground Film Festival, and it was entered into the International Competition section of the Oberhausen Film Festival. At the request of Patti Smith, Cohen made this short film for the release of her cover version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” providing a domestic portrait of Smith and her son Jackson.  Cohen’s Little Flags was also shown in the New York Underground Film Festival, as part of a retrospective series of the festival’s memorable works.

Bruce Conner passed away at the beginning of July. The San Francisco International Film Festival offered the last screening of his work before his death, and showed his latest film, Easter Morning. Conner’s photographs from the late seventies San Francisco punk scene are exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive until August. Finally, Conner’s photographic series Angels is included in the 55th Carnegie International, on view through January.

Paul DeMarinis’ Hypnica was included in the 01SJ Festival, in the exhibition Superlight. In this piece, electronically rigged metronomes speak in the voices of hypnotists to lull the listener into a receptive aural state. DeMarinis' Raindance was also installed as part of the 01SJ Festival. In this piece, jets of water modulated by audio signals carry sound vibrations that are inaudible to the human ear. The sounds cannot be heard until the water jet is intercepted by a large umbrella, where sound is then decoded and resonated from the umbrella's surface.

Andrés di Tella’s Fotografías was shown in the 36th Huesca Film Festival, held in Spain in June. In this personal essay, based on a box of photographs, di Tella traces the imprints of his mother’s history. (Argentina)

Arthur Dong’s Hollywood Chinese began its theatrical release in April, at San Francisco’s Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.  It then traveled to Los Angeles, Pasadena and two theaters in New York. This documentary served as the Opening Night film for the Arizona International Film Festival, and as the Centerpiece Presentation of the Hawaii International Film Festival. It was included in the international film festivals of Hong Kong, Seoul and Jerusalem.  It was also featured in the Council on Foundations’ 41st Film & Video Festival, where it was a 2008 Henry Hampton Award winner. Drawing from a trove of rare and memorable film clips, Dong’s film charts the visual and social history of the Chinese in American feature films.

Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk was screened as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Monday Nights with Oscar series, in June, in New York City. This academy-award winning documentary tells the story of the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California. It follows the tumultuous story of Milk's grassroots political organizing and election, through to his shocking murder and its repercussions. The screening featured a restored print from the Academy Film archive and an onstage conversation with Epstein.

Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser’s installation Point A to B was included in Impermanent Markings, a group show exhibited at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in April. Inspired by the urban athletics of parkour, digitally animated figures jump through spaces where action, perception, and location are continually overturned.

Rodney Evans participated in Tribeca All Access program, with his project Day Dream, where he was awarded an honorable mention in the narrative category.  Evans also won NewFest’s first ever NewDraft Screenplay Competition, for this proposed film.  Day Dream is set in New Orleans at the home of Buddy Bolden, the forefather of modern jazz, and Billy Strayhorn, the openly gay composer of numerous Duke Ellington tunes. Finally, Evans was awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Award.

Chris Eyre produced Imprint, a feature narrative that weaves Native mythologies into a supernatural thriller. Imprint was shown at the Hoboken International Film Festival and the Talking Stick Film Festival, both in June.

Su Friedrich was honored at the 22nd London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with a 10 film retrospective screening. The films shown included her Fellowship-funded pieces Rules of the Road and First Comes Love.  These works reinvent familiar tropes of road trips and matrimony to comment upon personal freedom and homosexual civil rights.  exper experimental documentary From the Ground Up was shown in the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema and in the Athens International Film Festival, held in Ohio in April. This documentary follows the path of one cup of coffee, illuminating the vast economic system that supports its production and distribution.

Andrew Garrison’s feature documentary Third Ward, TX was featured in the Council on Foundations’ 41st Film & Video Festival. The film takes its title from a Houston neighborhood that was reclaimed by artists and consequently subjected to the forces of gentrification.

Haile Gerima’s Harvest 3000 Years was shown in the Tribeca Film Festival. Recently restored by the World Cinema Foundation, Gerima shot this film in 1975,  on black-and-white 16mm, with non-actors speaking Amharic, in the midst of Ethipia’s civil war.

Jacqueline Goss’ Stranger Comes to Town was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival. In this experimental, animated documentary, six people are interviewed about their experiences coming into the US. Each then designs a video game avatar who tells their story by proxy.

Ava Hamilton's films Everything Has a Spirit and Indians for Indians were screened in the Talking Stick Film Festival's Classics Program.   Hamilton also served as moderator for the panel Cultural Responsibility, which considered whether films are speaking to concerns surrounding cultural preservation and environmental issues. Furthermore, Hamilton was the film archivist and media manager for the festival.

Sterlin Harjo wrote the short narrative Fish, which was shown in the Talking Stick Film Festival.  In this film, directed by Sami Kubo and Antonia Maria Ramos, two urban Indian teenagers become unlikely friends as they share skateboarding, fish and magic.

Helen Hill’s footage and story was showcased in Cleveland Street Gap, a short film by Courtney Egan which was awarded a Director's Choice Prize by the 27th Black Maria Film Festival.  Egan provides a reflexive vignette of the house in New Orleans which Hill shared with her family. Egan overlays double exposures combining water-damaged footage found in the house after Hurricane Katrina with her own new color footage to create a poignant eulogy to Hill, who was murdered in January 2007.

Shih-Chieh Huang's Twilight Zone was included in the 01SJ Festival, in the biennial exhibition Superlight. Huang’s work was also included in Austria’s Offenes Kulturhaus Biennale Cuvée, in Linz in April. Huang’s installations encompass synthetic ecosystems made up of everyday objects such as household appliances, zip ties, water tubes, lights, computer parts and cheap motorized toys.

Kenneth Hung’s "Residential Erection" served as his first solo show in New York, at Postmasters Gallery in April and May. Political satire gets a hyperbolic pop treatment in Hung's digitally animated videos and complementary 3-D tableaus. This show included the video Gas Zappers, which outlines the concerns and approach of Hung's Fellowship-funded video game project of the same title. Gas Zappers places a polar bear in the position to save the world from environmental destruction- in action hero style.

Peter Hutton’s artistic career was the honored at the Museum of Modern Art, in May. The museum presented a comprehensive retrospective of Hutton's eighteen films. As a poetic portraitist of city and landscape, Hutton has spent nearly forty years voyaging around the world, often by cargo ship, to create sublimely meditative, luminously photographed, and intimately diaristic studies of place.   Among the films included in this screening series, Lodz Symphony presents the city of Lodz as a 19th-century industrial atmosphere populated with the ghosts of Poland’s tragic past.

Ken Jacobs’ GIFT OF FIRE Nineteen (Obscure) Frames That Changed the World was featured in the Tribeca Film Festival. This experimental short examines the nineteen film frames that remain of artist and inventor Louis Le Prince’s 1888 movie about Leeds Bridge, presented in visual stereo. Jacobs was also found acting in the feature film Momma’s Man, which was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival and in Cinevegas. In this story, a grown man stays at his parents’ house indefinitely. Jacobs’ son Azazel directed the film and cast both of his parents.

Joan Jonas’ reworked performance piece The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, is exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, through July  This multimedia installation, featuring five channel video and related objects, was inspired by a nineteenth century account of the Hopi Indian snake ritual.

Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar’s installation Point A to B was included in Impermanent Markings, a group show exhibited at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in April. Inspired by the urban athletics of parkour, digitally animated figures jump through spaces where action, perception, and location are continually overturned.

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and Seattle International Film Festival. This feature, starring Julianne Moore, dramatizes the scandal involving the Baekeland family, titans of the plastics industry.

Senain Kheshgi’s Project Kashmir made its world premiere at the 2008 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, held in June by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. This feature documentary follows two American friends (co-directors Kheshgi and Geeta Patel), one Hindu and one Muslim, as they enter the war zone of Kashmir to investigate the 60-year rivalry between their homelands India and Pakistan.

Sandra Kogut’s Mutum was shown in the San Francisco International Film Festival. This narrative feature shows life from the perspective of a ten year old boy living with his family on an isolated farm in the Brazilian countryside. Separations and betrayals force him to slowly develop a new awareness of the complexity of human relationships. (Brazil)

George Kuchar and his brother Mike were featured in a special program during the Los Angeles Film Festival.  The ten shorts in this program offered an introduction to the early work of the Kuchar brothers who used 8mm, neighborhood friends, camp sensibilities and their mother to craft outlandish love letters to Hollywood. Kuchar also contributed short films to the monthlong series Are U FO’ Real, presented weekly in June at the Maysles Institute, in New York.

Anne Lewis’ documentary Morristown was included in the traveling documentary showcase Ambulante: Gira de documentales 2008, a film festival that toured Mexico with 42 screenings in a number of cities from February to April. In this film, working-class people in Mexico and eastern Tennessee are caught in the throes of massive economic change, which challenges their assumptions about work, family, nation and community.

Larry Blackhorse Lowe’s Hey Indian was shown in the Talking Stick Film Festival.  In this short narrative, co-directed with David Stevens, a lonely white guy tries to discover his inner Indian.

Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness was included in Cinevegas, and also shown with Inertia in the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Wellness, Mahaffy's award-winning feature narrative, examines several days in the life of a middle-aged pyramid scheme salesman. Inertia, the latest entry in Mahaffy’s motion study series, tracks a man running as hard and as long as he can in a full suit of Middle Age armor.

Victor Masayesva, Jr.’s Paatuwaqatsi — Water, Land and Life had its world premiere as the opening night film of the Talking Stick Film Festival.  This lyrical documentary follows the pace of a 78–year old man and a 14-year old girl as they run on a 2,000 mile route to Mexico. This work serves as a celebration of the message “Water Is Life," carred through the ancient tradition of running. (Mexico)

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s We will live to see these things…  was included in the Whitney Biennial and was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival. This five part video documentary presents competing visions of an uncertain future as Damascus, Syria faces both a growing conservative Islamic movement and intense pressure from the United States. Meltzer and Thorne also presented not a matter of if but when...,which served as an interpretative collaboration between them and Syrian artist Rami Farah, at a special screening in conjunction with the Biennial.

Liz Mermin’s Shot in Bombay was shown in Hot Docs.  This feature documentary tells three intertwined stories: the rise of the city's underworld in the 1990s, narrated by a no-nonsense ex-police chief known as "Bombay's Dirty Harry"; the tribulations of superstar Sanjay Dutt, on trial for alleged involvement in India's largest terrorist attack; and a young director's dogged quest to master the delicate art of making a Bollywood blockbuster.

Jon Moritsugu’s manic short Crack was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival, as part of a retrospective series of the festival’s memorable works.

Ruben Ochoa’s sculpture Ideal Disjuncture was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Ochoa relocates industrial or outdoor materials such as cement and rebar into the gallery, and by doing so he juxtaposes refinement with grit. This piece suggests a tree’s roots ripping through sidewalks. Ochoa was also awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Award.

Leighton Pierce’s short Number One was shown at the New York Underground Film, San Francisco International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. It was also awarded a Jury's Choice First Prize by the Black Maria Film Festival, and was included in the festival's nationwide tour. This experimental short offers a sensual textured and impressionistic meditation on water, time and the body.

Sam Pollard produced and edited Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which was shown at Silverdocs. This acclaimed television documentary turns an unflinching eye towards New Orlean’s Katrina-induced nightmare.

Heather Rae participated in Tribeca All Access program, with her project Family: The First Circle. This documentary is intended to explore and question the structure of American families whose children have become wards of the state because of drugs, neglect or poverty. Rae also produced the narrative feature film Frozen River, which was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of their Sundance Institute at BAM screening series. This narrative pairs two women, facing different desperations, who smuggle illegal immigrants through a Mohawk reservation in upstate New York.

Yvonne Rainer was honored in April with a retrospective series of her films, at the Reina Sofia Museum, in Madrid. Included in this series were Rainer’s two Fellowship-funded films Privilege from 1991 and MURDER and murder from 1996. MURDER and murder juggles genres as it follows two older women from different backgrounds who grapple with both love and cancer. Privilege tackles menopause, focusing on the experience from differing perspectives of origin and class. Privilege was also included in a special retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in June, of works distributed by Zeitgeist Films.

Dee Rees was awarded Best Director of a Short, for Pariah at the Jackson Hole Film Festival, held in Wyoming in June. Pariah was also featured in the Walker Art Center’s “Queer Takes: Visibly Out Series,” in June. In this film, a black lesbian teenager struggles with self-doubt as she juggles multiple identities in an attempt to please both her friends and family. Rees also participated in the Sundance Institute’s Directors Lab, held in Utah in June, working on the feature-length adaptation of Pariah.

Jennifer Reeves presented her films at Brooklyn’s Light Industry screening series, in May.  The night included earlier work such as The Girl’s Nervy, a work in progress of Trains Are for Dreaming and a live film performance of He Walked Away, which featured double projection.

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy & Lucy had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section. This narrative feature follows a woman whose life is derailed en route to a potentially lucrative summer job. When her car breaks down and her dog is taken to the pound, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, leading her through a series of increasingly dire economic decisions.

Julia Reichert  and Steven Bognar’s A Lion in the House was featured in The Council on Foundations’ 41st Film & Video Festival, where it was a 2008 Henry Hampton Award winner. Their feature documentary follows five families of diverse racial and economic backgrounds whose children are battling cancer.

Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, co-written with Fellow David Riker, was included in the Edinburgh and San Francisco International Film Festivals, as well as the Sundance Institute at BAM screening series. In May, it was acquired by Maya Releasing for an upcoming theatrical release. This sci-fi narrative unfolds in a near future in which workers telemigrate to the United States, while their bodies remain in Mexico.

Fatimah Tobing Rony’s Chants of Lotus (co-directed with three other women) had its U.S. Premiere at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. This narrative feature dramatizes stories about four women characters in modern Indonesian society, drawing upon themes of teenage sex, abortion, child trafficking, and AIDS.

Jay Rosenblatt’s Beginning Filmmaking was shown in Hot Docs, the Tribeca Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Silverdocs and Huesca International Film Festival. This short documentary follows a year as videotaped by his young daughter.

Ben Rubin devised a new message and encryption scheme for the Semaphore, four high-power LED emitters mounted at the top of the Adobe Alamaden Tower in San Jose. The Semaphore transmitted its message at the opening of the 01SJ Festival.

Ira Sachs’ Married Life was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. This narrative feature provides a comic and at times harrowing look at the pitfalls and pathologies of marriage.

Lynn Sachs produced the online exhibition abecedarium: nyc for the New York Public Library. This interactive site uses original video, animation, photography and sound to create relationships between 26 unusual words and locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each word leads to a different short video and a location in the city. Sachs created the exhibition with Susan Agliata, collaborating with other artists, including George Kuchar, to produce content.

Scott Snibbe’s latest work Falling Girl premiered at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in June, and will be on display through August.  This cinematic animation was inspired by surrealist writer Dino Buzzati's short story and presents the story of a young girl who jumps from a skyscraper and transforms into an older woman as she slowly descends to the ground. Snibbe’s Boundary Functions was included in the Metalandscapes exhibition at Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca, Spain, which was exhibited from May 2007 until June 2008. In this piece, people explore the boundaries of personal space when lines are drawn between them as they walk on a large projected floor.

Valerie Soe’s Art/Film/Revolution was shown in the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Originally commissioned to commemorate the Media Arts Fellowships 20th Anniversary, Soe’s experiemental short offers a visual meditation on the motion picture camera’s role as an activist’s weapon.

Eddo Stern’s Portal, Wormhole, Flythrough was included in the 01SJ Festival, in the biennial exhibition Superlight. This installation is a monumental portal structure that houses a central projection sequence of found 3D animations of tunnels, wormholes, voids, and flythroughs. Stern also served as a guest curator at Brooklyn’s Light Industry screening series. He presented fan-made machinima from the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, focusing on videos that operate outside the traditional reverence of fan art and the game world's own parameters, such as those dealing with real-life death, pornography, and drugs. Stern also shared a single channel version of his Best Flame War Ever in which dueling animated conversations re-enact the chatroom hostility from a videogame forum.

Rene Tajima-Peña’s feature documentary Calavera Highway was shown in the San Francisco International Film Festival. As they travel across the country, two brothers grapple with their mother’s recent death, their father’s disappearance years ago, and with the different directions that their siblings’ lives have taken.

Hank Willis Thomas' work is included in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy which opened at the High Museum of Art in June, to be exhibited until October. This exhibition features the premiere of Thomas’ complete Unbranded series. Unbranded represents advertising images from which the text has been stripped, producing a reflection on the historical formation and dissemination of stereotypes.

David Thorne and Julia Meltzer’s We will live to see these things…  was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival. This five part video documentary presents competing visions of an uncertain future as Damascus, Syria faces both a growing conservative Islamic movement and intense pressure from the United States. Meltzer and Thorne also presented not a matter of if but when...,which served as an interpretative collaboration between them and Syrian artist Rami Farah, at a special screening in conjunction with the Biennial.

Leslie Thornton’s video Stills from Let Me Count the Ways 10…9…8…7…6, was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. This work in progress piece is presently composed of five short segments compressed into a 22-minute exploration of the Hiroshima bombing, including its scientific preparation, surrounding confusion and the aftereffects. Thornton’s work combines original and archival footage, video and still images, and digital media.  Also, her short film Photography is Easy was shown in the New York Underground Film Festival.

Tran T. Kim-Trang’s Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life was shown in the Los Angeles Pacific Film Festival.  This experimental piece from Kim-Trang’s “Blindness” series ruminates on the visible and invisible traces one leaves behind, the never-ending cycle of life and death, and on imaging technologies that allow one to see an unborn child.

Camille Utterback’s Untitled 5, an interactive video installation which challenges conventional artistic processes by adding time and interactivity to abstract painting, was included in Impermanent Markings, a group show exhibited at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in April.

Marco Williams co-directed the feature documentary A Son’s Sacrifice, which was honored with a 2008 Henry Hampton Award at the Council on Foundation’s 41st Film & Video Festival.

Nathan Young participated in Tribeca All Access program, with the project Heavy Metal Indians, where he was awarded an honorable mention in the screenwriting category.  In this proposed film, a rebellious Native American teenager struggles with misfits, methamphetamines, and an unexpected act of violence that changes him forever.

Jessica Yu’s Ping Pong Playa was screened in the Los Angeles Pacific Film Festival. In her narrative feature debut, Yu departs from her usual world of documentary film into the sport of ping pong, lampooning the common perceptions and misconceptions regarding the Asian American experience.

Andrei Zagdansky’s Orange Winter was awarded a Jury's Choice First Prize and Audience Choice Selection by the 27th Black Maria Film Festival, and was included in the festival's nationwide tour. This lyrical documentary charts the peaceful revolution in the Ukraine that developed after the fall of the USSR.

Marina Zurkow’s Paradoxical Sleep was included in the 01SJ Festival, in the biennial exhibition Superlight. This site specific installation, viewed on screens throughout the San Jose Convention Center, unfolds as a suite of video portraits of the building and the nearby Guadalupe River, meshing the two sites into a single tributary of flood and flow.