Jeanne Liotta (Associate Professor, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts) has a Solo exhibition at the Microscope Gallery, NYC, The World is a Picture of The World, featuring a new body of work incorporating drawing, collage, photography, and projection that are inspired by and often include among their materials 20th Century NASA 35mm slides of the universe that were frequently offered in the planetarium and other similar gift shops.

"Through the works on view — an 80-image handmade 35mm slide composition, several single-slide projections on graphite drawings, and a series of colored photographic gels on photogram works — Liotta recognizes that humanity’s visual understanding of the universe is based on its photographic reproductions of what exists beyond what the eye can see. The artist considers the ways these pictures have been used to inspire us, both positively and negatively, and draws connections among nature, astronomy, and the photographic process, all dependent on light and time."

Visit the  for more information.

Also, check out this mention.

Congratulations Jeanne! 

Image from: Jeanne Liotta, “My Mind of Universes Erupting Continuously,” 2021, 80 looping handmade 35mm slide projection installation – Courtesy of the artist and Microscope

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CINE Associate Professor Erin Espelie and CINE MFA Alumni Emily Van Loan each have a film showing in ! 

The festival features 61 works of film and video by 66 artists representing 22 countries and territories presented in 9 curated programs. Watch Erin and Emily's work in Program 5 titled inside this shared life, and it will be premiering over live stream on Tuesday, September 21 7pm PDT. For more information  

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Mountains are burning, two children climb through the riverbed over slippery stones, cattle owners trim and soap their most prized steers for the show, something has turned a body of water into a boneyard.

Taking its name from a poem by the late filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz, On Fire in a Body of Water is a one-night experimental film screening, presenting thirteen contemporary moving image works in Telluride, Colorado. The program speaks to daydreams, disillusions, and anxieties of the North American landscape, reverberating the seismic ground in which our world continues to shift.

It takes place at the Telluride Transfer Warehouse 201 S Fir on August 2, 2021, at 6:30pm. 

Cinema Professor Erin Espelie, Alumni Christin Turner, and current MFA student Eileen Roschina will be screening work. Check out the webpage  for more details. 

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Professor Kelly Sears directed and created a new music video for Sleater-Kinney’s "High In The Grass", a colorful and surreal ode to radical empathy and collective care. It is one of many of her inventive and affecting works. Watch it .

How did the collaboration with Sleater-Kinney begin? 

I received an email about making a video for Sleater-Kinney from the secret album they recorded during the pandemic. After listening to the incredible song, I imagined a video about radical empathy and bodies swapping heads as a form of collective care. I shot some sketches in the ATLAS Studio Lab 2, an intimate green screen studio, and after teaching that day, stayed up all night, making some rough collages for the video. Sleater-Kinney dug it, and I had less than a month to flush out sketches and build a world.

Who did you work with? 

I am infinitely lucky to call on the immense talent and phenomenal resources available to make films at the University of Colorado. I immediately turned to former CINE graduate student and current adjunct Laura Conway (MFA 2021) to be the Producer and Director of Photography for this video. She brought former CINE BFA student Mariah Diaz on as Production Coordinator and COVID Safety Officer. Laura also suggested Madison Palffy, a graduate student in the Dance department, as a Movement Director for the project. I have had all these women as students in various courses, and it was energizing to work with them as peers on this project!  

Laura and Madison reached out to members of the CU dance community and there was such an abundance of talent on the shoot, ranging from undergrads to faculty from the Dance department. 

What was the shooting day like?

We held a one-day, 10-hour shoot in the ATLAS Studio Lab 1, a state-of-the-art broadcast studio with an impressive green screen built by Bret Mann from the ATLAS Institute. After we shot the video, I began animating that night as the video had to be delivered in less than two weeks.

Kelly Sears teaches an Experimental Digital Animation course each spring.

“All the techniques used in this video – green screen, masking/rotoscoping, looping, and collaging – we explore as a class, both technically and theoretically.” 

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Mimesis, a new film festival on campus, organized by the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, is running from August 12-18. The festival will feature new work by members of CU Cinema Studies faculty, Jay Gluckstern among others! Cinema Studies grads Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart will be serving as two of the four judges.

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Phil Solomon, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado, 91������, passed away on April 20, 2019. The department, his lifelong academic home, is hosted a film screening and remembrance of his life and work as an artist and educator.

"Phil had immense hope. He was a celebrant of life. Enormously generous in spirit in friendship in his art. His films were deeply personal and people responded to them personally. His films are effulgent, vibrant but they are pitched towards mourning and memorialization. What the late Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine once acknowledged as 'Constructive Melancholy.'" - Mark McElhatten, 2019

Mark McElhatten on Phil Solomon

CU alumnus Joe Miller (BFA, 1994; MFA University of Kansas), an associate professor of English and Film at Columbus State University, has shared with me a loving homage to Phil Solomon just published in Bright Lights Film Journal online.

Phil Solomon In Memoriam EH Millenium Film Journal

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