Bios of the Film Makers:

Abigail Child – School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – Film TBD

Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage and sound/image relations pushes the envelope of film/video with humor and ephemeral beauty. Her recent work explores mixed genres and strategies for rewriting narrative, as well as exploring public space through memory and history. Child's films and videos have won many awards and have been shown in retrospectives in conjunction with the New Museum at Anthology Film Archives (New York), Torino Film Festival (Italy), ICA (London), Mercer Union Gallery (Toronto), The Collective For Living Cinema (New York), The San Francisco Cinematheque and Frameline Film Festival (California). The work has officially been selected for the Oberhausen Film Festival, Visions du Reel, Nyon, the London and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, Pesaro Film Festival (Italy), the New York Film Festival and Video Sidebar, the Latin American International Short Film Festival (Toronto), and World Wide Video Festival (Den Haag)-among many others. Child studied History & Literature at Radcliffe College (Magna cum laude) and graduated with an MFA from Yale University School of the Arts (Honors). She is currently Chair of Film /Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Luther Price – School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Film TBD

Luther Price is largely known as an experimental filmmaker working in Super 8, and he also works in sculpture, photography and performance where he works in disreputable formats, “appearing in various guises from stylized, frozen-faced drag queen, to naked performance artist, to clown. Price’s film work has an oppressive intensity, envisioning an alienated world of often mindlessly repeated rituals and poses that entrap and suffocate his subjects. Price’s subject emerges as the breaches, breakdowns, and collapse of body, family, and society, in the face of unstoppable philosophical forces” (Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal). Price has had solo exhibitions of his work at Thread Waxing Space, New York (1999) and at the San Francisco Cinematheque (2000). His work has been widely screened in the United States and Europe, at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the W hitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He recently screened new films as part of Momenta Art’s exhibition Still Ill (2005). Price received a B.F.A. in Sculpture and Media and Performing Arts from Massachusetts College of Art.

Kathryn Ramey – Emerson College - The Passenger (2006) 17 min

Dr. Ramey is an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker. Her research interests fall under the fields of visual communication, urban and cultural anthropology. As an experimental filmmaker her work draws on the rich tradition of exploration of material processes that has characterized the small gauge films of many American avant-gardists: hand-processing, optical printing, and working the very surface of the celluloid through bleaching, scratching, painting and other physical manipulations. Her award winning films have shown at numerous festivals including the Toronto Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Athens film and Video Festival, the Telluride Experimental Film Exposition, the Onion City film festival, and the MIX Film festival among others. She has been the recipient of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Arts and Society dissertation fellowship, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, the LEF New England Moving Image Grant among other awards. She has been an artist resident at Yaddo Corporation. She has published articles in Visual Anthropology Review and The Independent and co-authored an essay on Carolee Schneeman with filmmaker/scholar MM Serra in the anthology Women's Experimental Cinema soon to be published by Duke University Press.

Jeannie Simms – School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - 1974 in California (2006)

Jeannie Simms is a visual artist working in the avant-garde tradition using photography, cinema and performance. Her work deals with biography, speech, and historical legacy. She uses stories, texts and biographies from real and fictional people to explore the interconnections between subjectivity, language, environment and representation. Jeannie Simms’ works have screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (06), Courtisane Video and New Media Festival in Belgium (06), the ICA in London (02), the ARS Electronica Center in List Austria (03), Kunstbuero in Vienna, Austria (03), the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (04), the Alternative Film Center in Belgrade, Serbia and Montengro (03), Los Angeles County Exhibitions (LACE, 05), the MIX festival in New York (02, 03), the Eigth Biennial in Havana, 4D project in Havana, Cuba (03) and during a solo show at the OHT Gallery in Boston (04). She holds an MFA from UC Irvine and is on the graduate and photography faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lives in Cambridge and stops regula rly in Los Angeles.

Gina Kamentsky - Northeastern University and Mass Art, Boston - Film TBA

Gina Kamentsky creates kinetic sculptures which exist in the somewhat chaotic and messy real world and animated films for the screen where gravity is a bit less of a concern. Her path leading to this follows some interesting twists and turns starting in Buffalo New York where she played punk rock at night and during the day, slept under her office desk at Fisher Price with occasional breaks to design toys for infants and toddlers. Between then and now she's invented games and toys , created a giant clock which burns sticks of incense, built a series of robot sculptures on commission, created sculptural lighting for a roadhouse in Texas joined a motorcycle gang, designed a couple of logos and created several animated films including one about doughnuts having sex.

sam smiley - Lesley University, Cambridge - Film TBA

sam smiley is a media artist and educator who works within the intersection of video art, video music, and the sciences. Her work has shown at media festivals around the world: Deutscher Videokunstpries: The German Award for Video Art, Karlsruhe, Germany, The National Poetry Association’s Cine(e) Poetry Festival, San Francisco, CA, Spain, and Locarno Film and Video Festival, Locarno, Switzerland, and others. Recently, this fall, her work has screened at 6dofpuebla07 muestra de cine y video experimental y alternativo in Puebla, Mexico, and she will be presenting work at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in November 2007. She is an assistant professor at Lesley University in the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Creative Arts in Learning.