San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
800.345.SFAI / 415.49.4500
In Spring 2012, the San Francisco Art Institute will present the Radical Directing Lecture Series, featuring five guests who take radical approaches to cinema. Organized to complement a new course taught by Film Department Chair Lynn Hershman Leeson for SFAI’s MFA program in Film, the series emphasizes techniques and styles that veer from traditional narratives, as well as the conceptual frameworks directors use to cinematically articulate characters, plot, subtext, tension, and drama.
All events are free and open to the public, and will be held Wednesday evenings at 7:30 pm in the SFAI lecture hall at 800 Chestnut Street.
February 1: Gene Youngblood
An internationally known theorist of media arts and politics, Gene Youngblood is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement. His Expanded Cinema (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was seminal in establishing media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly discipline.
February 15: Shari Frilot
Shari Frilot is curator of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program, which focuses on cinematic work being created at the intersections of art, film, and new media technology. She is also a filmmaker, of works including Strange & Charmed, A Cosmic Demonstration of Sexuality, and the feature documentary Black Nations/Queer Nations?.
February 29: Terry Zwigoff
Terry Zwigoff is the director of the documentary Crumb (1994), about underground comics figure Robert Crumb, and the feature film Ghost World (2001), based on the comic book by Daniel Clowes. Zwigoff won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary with Crumb and was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Ghost World. His most recent film was Art School Confidential.
March 7: Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
For over twenty years, Emmy-award winning directors/producers Dan Geller and Danya Goldfine have created multi-character documentary narratives, including Ballets Russes (2005) and Something Ventured (2011). Their next film is Satan Came to Eden: The Galapagos Affair, a murder mystery documentary set in the Galapagos Islands circa the 1930s.
April 18: Carroll Ballard
Carroll Ballard’s features include The Black Stallion (1979), Never Cry Wolf (1983), and Fly Away Home (1996), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best cinematography. His most recent film is Duma (2005), about a young South African boy’s friendship with an orphaned cheetah.
MFA Film Program at the San Francisco Art Institute
Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. Filmmakers at SFAI were central to the development of underground and experimental film, and the MFA program in Film builds on this tradition of innovation. Graduate film students at SFAI explore the synergies between materiality, technology, and representation, and the curriculum challenges the boundaries between film and other storytelling media. This cross-disciplinary approach, extending to performance, sound, writing, and installation, seeks to further enhance students’ practice as both thinkers and makers.
SFAI is now accepting applications for Fall 2012 entry to the MFA program
Priority application deadline: January 15, 2012
After January 15, applications will be accepted on a space-available basis.
For more details, please visit www.sfai.edu/graduate-application-process
