JURORS ANNOUNCED FOR THE 53RD AAFF
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is proud to announce the three esteemed jurors for the 53rd AAFF. Jesse McLean, Julie Murray, and Joanna Raczynska will each be in attendance throughout the week viewing over 120 films in competition and awarding over over $18,000 cash and in-kind awards. In addition, each juror will present a program of work during the festival.
Jesse McLean is a media artist who has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize, (FIPRESCI Prize) at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2014 and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at University of Iowa.
Her videos have been included in several editions of the AAFF, including the 48th edition where she received the “Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist” and the 50th AAFF where she received an award for “Best Sound Design”. At the 53rd AAFF, McLean will present a program of six works including her 2015 video, I’m in Pittsburgh and It’s Raining and an interactive video installation, Me and Max Martin.
Julie Murray - Drawing on her background in fine art, Julie Murray has made more than twenty-five film and digital works which have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Centre George Pompidou (Paris), the London Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her work was featured in the 2004 edition of the Whitney Biennial and her films are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Murray has presented her work at venues including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives, Media City Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto). Her early Super 8mm films were selected for a National Film Preservation Foundation Award in 2014. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Murray has been residing in the US since the 1980s. Her films have been screened and awarded in several editions of the Ann Arbor Film Festival since 2000, including the 47th AAFF where she received “Best Cinematography” award. At the 53rd AAFF, Murray will present a program of six 16mm films and one digital work including two works from 2014, Line of Apsides and End Reel.
Joanna Raczynska is assistant curator in the film department at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In the past, she’s worked for a variety of non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (media arts director, 2002-2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. She’s served as a juror for the Images Festival in Toronto and the Cleveland International Film Festival; volunteered as a screener for Silverdocs at the AFI Silver Theatre; and participated as a panelist for a variety of funding agencies including the New York State Council on the Arts’ Individual Artists Program. She holds a master’s degree in documentary by practice from Royal Holloway College, University of London, and a bachelor’s degree from University of Maryland Baltimore County where she first started making non-fiction films and videos.
Her work has screened at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Sheffield Doc/Fest, U.K.; Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY and other venues. Raczynska co-curated, with Ksenya Gurshtein, the eleven program series “Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990” at the NGA in 2014. At the 53rd AAFF, Raczynska will present a program of nine works from this series with films, all made in the 1970s, from Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Poland and Croatia.
IMAGE: I'M IN PITTSBURGH AND IT'S RAINING (2015) BY JESSE MCLEAN
Posted on February 26th, 2015
