KIRSTEN JOHNSON is currently grappling with her father’s dementia and the state of the planet by making a comedy about death. Her film Cameraperson premiered at Sundance 2016, was short-listed for an Academy Award, won the National Board of Review “Freedom of Expression” prize, and was named one of the ‘Top Ten Films of 2016’ by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Her short film, The Above premiered at the 2015 New York Film Festival and was nominated for the IDA Best Short of 2016. Kirsten’s camerawork has appeared in the Academy Award-winning Citizenfour, Academy Award-nominated The Invisible War, Tribeca Documentary winner, Pray The Devil Back To Hell, and Cannes winner Farenheit 9/11. She is curious about the future of image literacy, the nature of subjectivity, and believes in cinema.
LANA LIN has been making experimental films since the 1990s. Her work examines the fragilities and contradictions of human and discursive bodies, emphasizing the conceptual and poetic capacities of moving image media. Her latest film The Cancer Journals Revisited is prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today. Since 2001, she has collaborated on multi-disciplinary research-based projects (as Lin + Lam) that explore the contingencies of history and collective memory. Her art and films have been shown at international venues including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Oberhausen Film Festival; Images Festival, Toronto; the Taipei-China Institute, and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival. Lin has received awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and The MacDowell Colony. Lin is the author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, and teaches in the School of Media Studies, The New School, New York.