TALESE SHERTZER

DAVE WILLIAMSON

JORDAN PACKER

SHELLIE FLEMMING

Shellie Fleming has offered her insight and expertise to the indepen­dent film world for the last twenty years. Focus­ing on short format personal experimental films, she has addressed and explored a wide range of topics: from AIDS to the destructive aspects of human behavior. With her devotion to the single author approach to filmmaking, students and audiences are sure to gain some fascinating insight and information from this excellent experimental filmmaker.

Ms. Fleming, an Associate Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been the recipient of a variety of awards and grants throughout her career: in 2000 her film Life/Expectancy, a meditation on a woman’s mid-life search for meaning, was awarded Director’s Choice Award and toured nationally with the Black Maria Film and Video Festival; in 2001 Ms. Fleming was awarded Teacher of the Year at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Ornithology, a visual poem with an implicit criticism of the murderous charge within academic life, won the Peter Wilde Award for most Technically Innovative in 1996 at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

FRANÇOIS MIRON

Working since 1982, François Miron has mastered the film image manip­ulation technique known as optical printing (the re-photographing of film to achieve various special effects). In addition to his highly awarded and highly acclaimed body of short exper­imental films, Mr. Miron has: pro­duced music videos; created feature title sequence designs; experimented with still photography; worked on short narrative films; and has taught optical printing and various technical aspects of filmmaking since 1993 a the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal.Mr. Miron’s films have gained recognition and acclaim throughout his career: in 2001 Resolving Power, a surrealist cin­ematic oddity exploring the subconscious, the metaphorical, the absurd and the insane, was awarded Best Cinematography at the MicroCineFest in Baltimore; The Evil Surprise, a psychedelic found footage optical printing collage manifesto about social conditioning, won Best Experimental at the 1994 Ann Arbor Film Festival; What Ignites Me, Extinguishes Me, an industrial self-portrait about mindscape and architecture, won Best Experimental at the Illinois Film and Video Artist Film Festival in 1990; and his student film, 4x Horizontal, 4x Vertical, won Best Exper­imental at the Montreal World Film Festival.

TAMI GOLD

Tami Gold is a documentary video and filmmaker who has pro­duced and directed more than 20 films on: AIDS, gender, feminist and labor issues, drug addic­tion and Vietnam veterans. Ms. Gold has been hailed as a pas­sionate filmmaker seeking to broaden and deepen discussion and awareness about critical issues affecting diverse com­munities throughout the world. Audiences and students won’t want to miss the work of this woman who is “committed to the creation and dissemination of fiction and nonfiction films and videos about the complex lives of working people.”

Throughout her career Ms. Gold’s films have been rec­ognized and awarded for their excellence: her HBO special Out At Work: America Undercover won the 2000 GLAAD Media Award for Best Documentary; Another Brother, a docu­mentary about an African American Viet­nam Veteran won a Gold Hugo Award from the Chicago International Film Fes­tival in 1998; her groundbreaking doc­umentary about working-class gay men and lesbians on the job, Out At Work: Lesbian and Gay Men on the Job, premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast in Poland, Germany, France and Italy.