James Benning “James Benning’s films are among the most fascinating work in American cinema. Since the early 1970’s, Benning has produced films that defy categories, but nevertheless echo major directions the avant-garde tradition has taken sine 1945, including structural film and the new narrative movement. Benning explores the relationship between image, text and sound while paying expansive attention to the ‘vernacular landscapes’ of American life. His films offer a complex and idiosyncratic view of American politics and culture in the late 20th century and beyond.”
From James Benning, edited by Pichler and Slanar, 2007

Catherine Chalmers is a video artist and photographer who is fascinated with the American cockroach (Periplaneta Americana), as well as with other insects and their predators, and has made a series of videos and photographs exploring this interest. An engineering graduate of Stanford, with an MFA from London’s Royal College of Art, Chalmers has been featured in art galleries and science museums around the world. She is author of two Aperture books: Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey (2000) and American Cockroach (2004).

Matthew Coolidge is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. He serves as a project director, photographer and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written Back to the Bay: An Examination of the Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996). He lectures widely in the United States and Europe on contemporary landscape matters, and is a faculty member in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches a class about “nowhere.” Coolidge received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2004.

Tarek Elhaik is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rice University. He has curated film programs for various institutions including the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Society for Cinema Studies. He is currently working on a manuscript exploring the ethical and political implications of non-linear cinema in nationalist contexts.

Don Fredericksen (Colgate ‘67) is professor of film and director of undergraduate studies in film at Cornell University. He is the author of The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory: Hugo Munsterberg, and Bergman’s Persona, co-author of Wajda’s Kanal, and co-editor of Music and Film and Miedzy Swiadomoscia a Nieswiadonoscia: Wspolczesnosc w perspektywie psychologii glebi [Between Consciousness and Unconsciousness: The Present Day in the Perspective of Depth Psychology]. He has published individual essays on Larry Jordan, Rouquier, Wajda, Fellini, and Bergman, Polish post-communist documentary, the analogy of film to music, and Easy Rider, and a long series of essays testing the applicability of C.G. Jung’s depth psychology to film theory and film criticism. The latter form parts of a book project titled The Liminal Cinema: Filmmaking as a Rite of Self-Initiation.

John Gianvito is a filmmaker, curator, and critic. His films include the feature films The Flower of Pain, Address Unknown, and The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, cited as one of the top ten films of the year by critics in the Chicago Reader, and Film Comment. A graduate of Cal Arts and MIT, he has taught film production and film history at Rhode Island School of Design, Boston University, and Emerson College, and was film curator for 5 years at the Harvard Film Archive. In 2001 he was made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. His new film, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), was voted Best Experimental Film of 2007 by the National Society of Film Critics.

Leonard Retel Helmrich is a Dutch/Indonesian filmmaker, known worldwide as a major new voice in documentary filmmaking. Helmrich worked as a drama director, a cameraman, and a documentary filmmaker in the Netherlands before going to Indonesia to make a series of documentaries that have won awards world wide. He designed a special camera mount called “Steadywings” that allows extraordinary stability and maneuverability in shooting. Having spent years designing this technique he now also runs workshops for broadcasters and filmmakers to share his skills, most recently in Amsterdam, Belgium, South Africa, Germany, Indonesia and Sydney, Australia.

Peter Hutton is Professor of Film and Director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. He holds an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and has taught at Hampshire College, Harvard University, and SUNY Purchase. Hutton has produced more than 20 films, most of which are portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. His work has been screened at festivals in the United States and Europe and has been included in numerous major museum exhibitions, including four Whitney Biennials (1985, 1991, 1995, 2004). Since 1986, he has continued work on a series of landscape portraits of the Hudson River Valley while also developing projects in Bangladesh and Iceland. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, DAAD Berliner, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. At Sea is his longest film to date.  It continues his long interest in the sea and humanity’s relationship to its environment.

Marina McDougall has worked as a curator for the San Francisco Exploratorium, as well as with MIT and the California Academy of Sciences, designing exhibitions, film and lecture series, media installations, and internet projects at the intersection of art and science. In 2000 her book, Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, about the pioneering French nature filmmaker, was published by MIT Press. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley and Stanford, McDougall lives in San Francisco; she has taught at California College of the Arts, San Francisco State, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor, an ethnographic filmmaker, is currently completing a feature-length nonfiction film and video installation (with Ilisa Barbash) about the culture of sheepherders in Montana, and their relationships to the land and their animals, as well as issues of environmentalism and globalization. His previous works (all co-directed with Barbash), include Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), a video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art market. In and Out of Africa won eight international awards and was the subject of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum. Taylor is editor of Visualizing Theory (Routledge, 1994) and Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998) and co-author of Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (University of California Press, 1997). He was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review and currently is the director of Harvard’s Media Anthropology Lab and Associate Director of Harvard’s Film Study Center.