Let me welcome you to the 2018 BFA/MFA Film, Video, New Media, Animation and Sound Festival, held annually at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Over the course of these four evenings, you will have the chance to encounter the work of more than forty young artists across a wide range of moving-image and sonic genres, forms, and practices. Like their peers exhibiting in the BFA and MFA gallery shows, these students are engaged in a rite of passage that marks the culmination of their arts education and their official entry into the arena of public presentation. For these moving-image artists, this Festival entails the opportunity to see their work projected large and to share their visions with an audience of friends, family members, fellow students, faculty and staff, and the general public.
This year we are piloting a new model for programming the Festival. Based on feedback from our MFA students, we have invited two guest programmers to curate the Festival schedule. Emily Eddy and George William Price are both staff members of the Video Data Bank as well as alumni of our School. They bring both professional programming skills and a broad knowledge of the field to bear in organizing the works that constitute this year’s Festival.
Given the ubiquity of screens in contemporary culture, there will be a multitude of destinations for the works shown in these programs. Some of them will be festival-bound or encounter audiences online, others will form the basis of more ambitious projects, while all of them will serve to showcase the creativity, perseverance, and commitment of these young artists.
So please join us in congratulating this remarkable group of students as they celebrate the completion of SAIC’s demanding fine arts degree programs and begin the next chapters of their lives and careers.
Bruce Jenkins, Chair
Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
May 2018
The FVNMAS Festival 2018 will take place during the evenings of Wednesday, May 9th through Saturday, May 12th. Tickets are complimentary and will be available each day at the box office, which opens one hour before the first program of the day. Please check program listings for specific showtimes.
Presented by the Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies in collaboration with the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department, the Sound Department, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Special thanks to Casey Puccini, our Alumni Producer, who has worked tirelessly for the past six months preparing guidelines, managing schedules, and meeting with our students. And as always we are deeply grateful to the professionalism of Brandon Doherty and his team at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and to Mickey Mahoney, Emily Kuehn, Andrew Zoleta, and Dan Holmes in FVNMA for their technical support. Finally, many thanks to our colleagues in Department of Exhibitions and especially to Hannah Barco, Leigh Holmes, and Trevor Martin.