April 19, 2005
Contact: Brian Newman
National Video Resources
The Program for Media Artists
New York, NY
212-274-8080
bnewman@nvr.org

New York, NY - National Video Resources is proud to announce the recipients of its Media Arts Fellowships. Awarded annually for 18 years, the Media Arts Fellowships recognize the artistic excellence of 20 film, video and new media artists in the United States with Fellowships of $35,000 each. For the second year, two additional Fellowships of $7,500 each acknowledge emerging artists working in film and video whose work shows exceptional promise.

Since its establishment by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988, the Fellowships Program has awarded nearly $9.5 million to more than 270 gifted media artists working in the U.S. and is known as one of the most prestigious grants in the media arts. Past recipients have included 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Ira Sachs (40 Shades of Blue), Arthur Dong (License to Kill) and Cheryl Dunye (Stranger Inside). The full list of Fellows can be found at www.MediaArtists.org.

Tania Blanich, Director of the Program for Media Artists said, “We are inspired by the breadth of innovation and creativity of this year’s Fellows. Whether they are working in film or video or with the new digital technologies, or whether established in their careers or just starting out, these artists redefine and expand our notions of independent media. They represent some of the most talented individuals currently working in the independent media field in the United States.”

Brian Newman, Executive Director of National Video Resources, noted that NVR has administered the Fellowships program for the past 10 of its 18 years of continuous support. “These Fellowships recognize the vision of some of the most exciting media artists working today. Often, the Fellowship award represents the crucial ‘first money’ given in support of a project. We are pleased to continue our support of these film, video and new media artists.”

A rotating committee of experts in the independent media field - comprised of artists, scholars, curators and programmers throughout the United States - nominate artists to be considered for the Fellowships. Selected applicants may submit proposals for narrative, documentary, experimental, installation or work that centers on interactive, dynamic media, such as web art, robotics, virtual reality, and interactive installations. A panel of recognized media specialists is then convened to review the quality of the applicant’s proposed project as well as consider the caliber of the artist’s body of work to date.

National Video Resources (NVR) is a not-for-profit organization established in 1990 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Our goal is to assist in increasing the public’s awareness of and access to independently produced media - film and video as well as motion media delivered through the new digital technologies. The Program for Media Artists encompasses a range of activities designed to provide financial and technical assistance to media makers and to encourage the production, distribution and exhibition of independent media in all forms. The cornerstone of the Program’s activities is the Media Arts Fellowships. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation are key funders of the program.

The names of the 2005 Fellows and brief descriptions of their projects follow. An asterisk * next to the individual’s name indicates a recipient of an Emerging Artist Fellowship.

Stephanie Black
New York, NY

Voice of Jamaica is a feature-length documentary about the reggae singer/song-writer Buju Banton, whose lyrical content sparks national and international discourse.

Black has directed several documentary features, as well as numerous documentary segments for PBS, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network.

Michael P. Britto*
New York, NY

Gimme Five: History of a Handshake is a documentary examining the origin of the handshake in its evolution among different ethnic groups, focusing on urban culture in particular.

Britto is a videomaker and an artist/teacher at Downtown Community Television Center’s (DCTV) Visual Knowledge Program. He was Artist-in-Residence at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002.

Sam Chen
San Diego, CA

Amazonia is an animated short that examines the frailty of life in the Amazon Rainforest from the point of view of its animal inhabitants.

Chen is a self-taught computer animator who has produced several award-winning animated shorts. He is the Artistic Programmer and a resident filmmaker with the San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Jem Cohen
Brooklyn, NY

Late City Final is an experimental film about Times Square/42nd St., which represents both the American Dream and its failures, using footage shot by the artist from the late 1980s to the present.

Cohen, a 1995 Media Arts Fellow, mixes documentary, narrative and experimental genres. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of New York and the Whitney Museum, among other institutions.

Bruce Conner
San Francisco, CA

By and By: His Eye Is on the Sparrow is an experimental music documentary about the history and personality of Black gospel singer R.H. Harris, from a quartet begun in the 1920s called The Soul Stirrers.

Conner is an artist and filmmaker whose work is represented in the collections of major museums and archives in Europe and North America.

Matthew Coolidge
Culver City, CA

An Interactive Map of Points of Interest in the United States is a searchable, scalable, web-based digital map that locates, depicts and describes landmarks in the American landscape, such as land art or bombing ranges.

Coolidge is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. He has written several books and articles on contemporary landscape matters and teaches a class about “nowhere” at the California College of the Arts.

Dustinn Craig
Tempe, AZ

Ride Through Genocide (working title) is a documentary film chronicling a group of American Indian skateboarders who build a skateboard park on the rural and isolated White Mountain Apache reservation.

Craig is a videomaker who recently worked on the PBS series Matters of Race. An enrolled tribal member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, he has worked extensively with Native youth.

Chris Csikszentmihályi
Cambridge, MA

Edgy Products is a set of projects developing new technologies and resources for public performance and political activism.

Csikszentmihályi is the Fukutake Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Caran Hartsfield
Brooklyn, NY

Bury Me Standing is a comedic feature that follows four family members in the aftermath of the murder of a 26 year-old relative.

Hartsfield developed Bury Me Standing at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefoundation Residency in Paris and the 2003 Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab.

Miranda July
Los Angeles, CA

The North Star Man is a narrative feature about two elderly men - Victor, a widower, and Jack, a life-long bachelor. Their friendship grows on the promise that Victor will one-day introduce Jack to his sister Blanca.

July is a filmmaker, writer and multi-media performance artist whose debut feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know premiered at Sundance in January and will be released in June 2005.

Yael Kanarek
New York, NY

Chapter 3: Object of Desire is a web-based, fictional narrative in English, Hebrew and Arabic that focuses on a mythological relationship between an individual and an uncharted landscape in a parallel world - a relationship developed as a construct of language.

Kanarek is the founder of The Upgrade!, an international network that fosters dialog among artists, curators and educators working with new media.

Senain Kheshgi*
Athens, GA

Project Kashmir is a documentary about two American friends - one from Pakistan and the other from India - who journey into Kashmir to show two different perspectives of the politics and life of ordinary people in the conflicted area.

Kheshgi has a wide range of experience in broadcast news and reporting. The Queens Museum of Art in New York commissioned her first independent short documentary Family Recipe.

Spencer Nakasako
San Francisco, CA

Tru Cambodian is a feature-length narrative about life in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco as seen through the eyes of Sophy, the teenage daughter of Cambodian refugees, who comes to terms with her identity and origins.

Spencer Nakasako is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened in festivals in the United States and abroad. A 1997 Media Arts Fellow, he has been an artist-in-residence at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco since 1991.

Fatimah Tobing Rony
Los Angeles, CA

Gracie Makes A Movie is a narrative film about a woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against the backdrop of Sumatran culture.

Rony award-winning films have screened widely. An associate professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, she wrote The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle.

Ben Rubin/Mark Hansen
New York, NY/Los Angeles CA

Today is an evening-length multimedia stage performance in which live actors move, speak and sing according to instructions and streaming internet text received electronically through handheld wireless devices or monitors embedded in the stage sets.

Rubin is a multimedia artist and sound designer who has taught at the Yale School of Art and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Hansen is Associate Professor of Statistics at UCLA, where he also has a joint appointment in the Department of Design/Media Art. Rubin and Hansen collaborated most recently on Listening Post.

Ray Santisteban
San Antonio, TX

The Desert Flower is a short silent film about a Mexican family living in the United States in 1849, just after the end of the U.S.-Mexico War. The melodramatic story explores historical and political themes and is set to music written by a Mexican-born silent film era musician.

Ray Santisteban is a director and producer whose documentaries have been broadcast on PBS. He is the former director of Media Arts at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio.

James Spooner
Brooklyn, NY

Defend Brooklyn is a documentary that explores the promise, illusion and failure of integration in America through the lens of the seven neighborhoods that run along Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue.

James Spooner is the director of award winning film Afro-Punk, which screened widely at festivals. He is currently Resident Video Installation Artist at the Ase Dance Theatre Collective in New York.

Eddo Stern
Los Angeles, CA

MobBob is a 3-D computer game in which the player plays from the perspective of a mob, wandering between the sites of several historical events: the stoning of Jesus Christ; the First Crusade pillage of Jerusalem; the French, Russian and Iranian Revolutions; and the LA riots.

Stern works in various media, including computer software/game design, kinetic sculpture, performance, and film and video production. His work has been shown internationally at new media and film festivals, museums, galleries and game conventions.

Rachel Strickland
San Francisco, CA

Emptiness Can Hold Things is an interactive installation inspired by Japanese painting and landscape design. Viewers of the work find themselves in a polylinear video environment that combines architecture and cinematic construction to investigate Japanese definitions of place.

Rachel Strickland is a videographer and media designer whose projects have been exhibited internationally. She has taught at several universities and research labs, including MIT, Atari, Apple and Interval Research.

Ham Tran
Santa Ana, CA

Journey from the Fall is a narrative film about a Vietnamese family struggling against all odds to be re-united at the end of the Vietnam War, in a story about the preciousness of life, the sacrifices of love and the value of family.

Tran is a filmmaker, playwright, theater director, performer, poet and fine artist. He recently received his MFA from the UCLA Graduate School of Film and Television.

Pepe Urquijo
Oakland, CA

¡Bandido Vive! is a documentary that looks at the life and death of Oscar “Bandido” Gomez, a 22-year-old Chicano activist and radio DJ at UC-Davis whose murder in 1994 remains unsolved.

Urquijo is a filmmaker and writer who studied at San Francisco State University. His films have screened at festivals in the United States and Mexico.

Nathan H. Young IV
Tahlequah, OK

Hako is an animated film that tells the Pawnee story about the creation and order of the universe, and the gift of ceremony.

Young is an artist and educator who has been creating and developing stop-motion claymation films about Cherokee stories in the Cherokee language with children and teenagers. He co-founded a non-profit cultural organization that provides training for Native Americans.