ARTIST RESIDENCY
Basement Films’ Artist-in-Residence program grew out of a desire to exercise our film archive and invite filmmakers far and wide to explore the potentials of the collection. Artists-in-Residence are tasked with the job of conducting creative research amongst our collection and then presenting the results of their research in a public screening or lecture. The length of a residency is negotiable, however most artists have been with us for a period of 2-4 weeks.
At this time, the artist-in-residency program is by invitation only. That said, we would love to hear from you if you are interested in this opportunity.
Basement Films Artists in Residence:
2024
Jeremy Rourke
Jeremy Rourke is a stop motion animator, performer, and educator based in San Francisco, CA. After stitching together his first animated second (12 frames) in 2009, this meticulous, handmade, beautiful, and uncanny medium became home. He creates multimedia performances where, guitar in hand, he sings his projected animations into being.
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His commissioned work with documentary filmmakers has screened at festivals including Sundance and Frameline, and has been nominated for an Academy Award.
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During his Basement Films residency, Jeremy created a film/musical performance called "Think of a Cloud," a stop motion animation set in the Basement Films archive accompanied by an original song with lyrics pulled directly from film titles in the collection. "Think of a Cloud" premiered at Experiments in Cinema v20.0.
2023
Elizabeth Lowe
Elizabeth Lowe is a visual artist and writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. For the past ten years, she has created and collaborated with other filmmakers on a number of projects ranging from narrative and documentary films to artists’ moving image.
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Her film reviews on artists’ moving image are published in The Millennium Film Journal.
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Elizabeth currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland with her husband, daughter, and two cats. She holds an MFA in Film & Media Arts from the University of Utah.
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Elizabeth decided to use her residency as an opportunity to make a documentary about Basement Films and its legacy as a microcinema and film archive.
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2022
Marcella Earnest
Marcella Earnest is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans experimental film, video, sound, research, and performance. Her work explores the intersections of abstract expression, poetics, sound studies, remix culture, and Native feminisms. Through her art, she integrates critical research with embodied performance, engaging with both personal and collective histories to challenge conventional narratives. She received a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, an MA from the University of Washington’s Native Voices program for Indigenous documentary film and research methodologies, and a BA in Ethnic Studies from Mills College. Marcella is Gunflint Lake Ojibwe and an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior.
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Marcella used her time in the residency to find additional footage for her film Across the Lake (2024).
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2021
Rankin Renwick
Rankin Renwick is an artist by nature, not by stress of research. They put scholars to rout by embracing nature's teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, their iconoclastic work embodies their interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. They are the founder of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass.
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They have been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues.
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2020
Marika Borgeson
Marika Borgeson is a filmmaker and photographer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fascinated by the fluidity and mythology of American histories, she uses film and video to explore the suspension of time and the creation of legends through historic sites, museums, landscapes, and archives. She also works with 16mm film using cameraless techniques and alternative processes.
Her work has screened in galleries and festivals, including the New York Film Festival in Views from the Avant Garde, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Void Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland, and the Media City Film Festival in Windsor, Canada. Before receiving an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, Marika served as the Assistant Director of the Experiments in Cinema Film Festival in Albuquerque, NM.
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2019
Linda Fenstermaker
Linda Fenstermaker is an experimental filmmaker and graduate of Hampshire College. She works primarily on 16mm film. Her work explores interactions and relationships between body and landscape with a focus on representing organic food systems and empowered women. In addition to filmmaking, Linda has curated and co-curated multiple programs, including Ovular Films and the experimental program for Local Sightings Film Festival in Seattle, as well as been a visiting artist at The Evergreen State College, Seattle University and the University of Washington. She currently lives in the agricultural area of Skagit County in Washington State.
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During her residency, Linda made Sun Plant Hands (2021), a found footage film that explores the interactions between land and people in an agricultural framework. Through imagery of vegetable growing and footage of the United Farm Workers movement, the film calls into focus the dichotomies between land, plants and people.
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2018
Julie Perini
Julie Perini is a filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, video artist, reader, writer, teacher, question asker, raw nerve, hot spring hopper, product of the suburbs of New York and DIY culture of the 90s, and friend to many. Her involvement with the post-9/11 “War on Terror” spurred mher work with prison and police abolitionist movements. She is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and residencies and exhibist work in theaters, community spaces, galleries, campgrounds, storefronts, the sides of bridges, and many other venues. She sees movies in actual movie theaters. She likes old cameras. She eats pancakes at a diner at least once a week. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, she earned an MFA from the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, and a BS in Communication from Cornell University. She is currently a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
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2016
Kamila Kuc
Kamila Kuc a Polish-born, London-based filmmaker, whose hybrid media practice stems from the belief that although we are unable to change our pasts, we have the power to shape our future narratives. She sees moving image as a portal to our shared experience as we inhabit different moments of collective presence. Set within the realm of social choreography, her work considers complex ways to relate to one another through embodied, care and trust-building practices the foster collaboration and co-creation.
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During Kamila’s residency, she worked on her film I Think You Should Come to America (2017). In the film, the correspondence between two young and naïve pen-pals serves as a vehicle to explore the dangers of seeing cultures different from our own as ‘other.’ A young Polish woman (Kuc), coming of age in the dying embers of Communist Poland, seeks escape in the re-imagining of a romance with the American Dream through her correspondence with a young Native American man.
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2015
Caryn Cline
Originally from the Missouri Ozarks, Caryn Cline is a filmmaker and teacher who has been making films and videos for 30 years, working with found footage, shooting 16mm film, and creating handmade direct animation films. “Botanicollage” is a term she coined to describe the technique of creating direct animation films using botanical elements. As a filmmaker, Caryn is drawn to the kinaesethic and haptic qualities of filmmaking materials and processes. She often works with an optical printer. Besides making films, Caryn is the Executive Director of the Interbay Cinema Society and curates the Engauge Experimental Film Festival.
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Watch a video portrait of Caryn Cline's artist residency in 2015, directed by Simone Casabier: vimeo.com/153683283
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2014
OJOBOCA: Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy
OJOBOCA is a Berlin-based artist duo formed by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy. Their artistic practice is focused on experimental film and expanded cinema, exploring the intersection of myth, history, and technology. Their works often draw on cultural myths and archetypes to create otherworldly atmospheres that challenge the boundaries of traditional narrative structures. They call their working method Orrorism, which they define as an approach to filmmaking that seeks to subvert the manipulative power of images and create a communal experience of cinema that operates on the unconscious.
Through the use of devices such as narration and the trance state, Orrorism aims to challenge the authority of the film machine and create a space where the communal can exist beyond the structures of power. In essence, Orrorism is an attempt to use the power of film to disrupt dominant cultural narratives and create a space for collective exploration and self-reflection.
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2013
Wago Kreider
Wago Kreider is a media artist and experimental filmmaker. His creative work engages with contemporary strategies of artistic reenactment, the reconstruction of cinematic history, and the impact of film history on our perceptions of landscape and the environment.
His films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Hong Kong Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde at the New York Film Festival, the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, the Paris Festival of Different & Experimental Cinema, and at the International Film Festival of Vienna. He has participated in artist residencies at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in New York City, Basement Films/Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque, and at Berlinale Talents as part of the Berlin International Film Festival.
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A video portrait of Caryn Cline's artist residency in 2015, made by Simone Casabier
