Queer Lights
Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts Presents:
Queer Lights: New Projects by CCA Filmmakers
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018, 7-8:30 pm
Timken Auditorium, California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Free admission
“Queer Lights” presents work-in-progress by four award-winning CCA filmmakers: Kim Anno, Robert Epstein, Việt Lê, and Pratibha Parmar, followed by a discussion moderated by Jacqueline Francis.
“Queer Lights” is the Spring 2018 Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts program. QCCA brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQI topics in the humanities, architecture, design, and the arts. QCCA is an on-going collaboration between the Queer Cultural Center, California College of the Arts, and U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
Filmmakers
Kim Anno is a painter, photographer, book artist and filmmaker/video artist whose work has been exhibited by museums nationally and internationally. Her work has been collected by SFMOMA, Brooklyn Museum, Honolulu Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Crocker Museum, Oakland Museum, Getty Research Institute, Columbia University, University of Texas-Austin, the Walker Art Center, and Newberry Library.
Anno has been at work on an epic social practice film project, Men and Women in Water Cities, made with local actors, citizens in coastal communities who are grappling with sea level rise. She also is making two films in South Florida and Cuba. One is 90 Miles From Paradise, a project staged in Havana, Key West, and Miami. The second is a ¡Quba!, documentary on the LGBTQI community in Cuba. She recently she licensed four original Cuban bands’ songs for the film. Recently, Anno founded Wild Projects, a non-profit whose mission is to collaborate with communities world wide through fearless art, film, and performance productions that inspire resiliency in the face of adversity. She is Professor of Painting at CCA.
Rob Epstein is filmmaker of both nonfiction and scripted narrative film. He has won Academy Awards for The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Rob made history as the first openly gay recipient of an Oscar for the first LGBT-themed film recognized by the Academy. Epstein’s latest film End Game premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and begins streaming on Netflix May 4th. His Paragraph 175 received the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlinale Film Festival and a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance. Epstein is the recipient of four national Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, multiple GLAAD Media Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Documentary Association’s Pioneer Award. Career retrospectives have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (ICA), Taipei International Film Festival, Cinémathéque Québécoise in Montreal, and elsewhere. Other film credits include: Lovelace; The Battle of Amfar; HOWL; The Celluloid Closet; Where Are We? Our Trip Across America; and Word Is Out. He is Professor and co-chair of Film at CCA.
Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator. Lê has published in positions: asia critique; Crab Orchard Review; American Quarterly; Art Journal; Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, and elsewhere. Lê’s art and research have been featured at The Banff Centre, Rio Gay & Lesbian Film Fest; Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Tate Modern, Civitella Ranieri, the Smithsonian, and the Shanghai Biennale. Lê curated Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, 2005); and co-curated humor us (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 2008), transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (Seoul, Sài Gòn, Irvine, San Francisco, 2008-09), Kuandu Biennale (Taipei, 2012) and Love in the Time of War (SFCamerawork, 2017). He has co-edited special issues of Asian American Literary Review (Re-Collecting Vietnam) and Visual Anthropology (Myriad Modernities, 2018). He is collaborating with Michelle Dizon and Faith Wilding on White Gaze, an art book (Sming Sming Books & Objects, 2018). Lê serves on the Advisory Committee of SFCamerawork and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco Board. Lê is Assistant Professor in Visual Studies and Visual and Critical Studies at CCA.
Pratibha Parmar is a writer, director and producer of fiction, non-fiction, and experimental film. Parmar was awarded the ICON Award by the London Indian Film Festival in 2017 for her contribution to world cinema. She is the past recipient of The Visionary Award for her body of work from the One in Ten Film Festival in October 2007 and is a winner of the Frameline Film Festival Life Time Achievement Award. Parmar’s Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth (2014) is an award-winning documentary that tells the compelling life story of American literary who made history as the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Parmar is author and editor of several books, including The Empire Strikes Back (1982), Queer Looks (1993), and Warrior Marks (with Alice Walker) (1997). She is a member of (BAFTA) British Academy of Film and Television Association and a member of Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.
Parmar is Associate Professor in Film at CCA. She is a Board Member Emerita of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco.
Moderator
Jacqueline Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). Francis presently serves on the Advisory Boards of San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery and Root Division. She is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center (QCC), a multidisciplinary resource and advocacy site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. With Kathy Zarur, Francis co-curated the exhibition Where Is Here for the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, 2016-17). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective, Francis creates the occasional visual art object. She has exhibited work in group shows at Southern Exposure (San Francisco, 2016); the Katz-Snyder Gallery of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (2017); and the GLBT History Museum of San Francisco. She is a recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission and she is working on a collection of short stories. Francis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA.
