2026-2027 FRAMES OF REFERENCE annual program of artists’ film & video

Shorts Program One: Wednesday, September 30th, 6pm
Shorts Program Two: Thursday, October 1st, 6pm

Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born filmmaker based between London and Seattle. Her work brings together performance, movement, and hybrid nonfiction. Working through improvisation and collaboration, she creates films that attend to what exceeds language: gesture, sensation, and the body’s capacity to carry experience across generations. Her practice examines memory, ancestry, and womanhood as sites of inheritance, resistance, and transformation.

Her recent short, I Was There, won Best Experimental Film at the New Jersey International Film Festival, the Best Immigrant Story Ledo Matteoli Award at the 59th Humboldt International Film Festival, and Curator Award at Kinoskop. Her Plot of Blue Sky premiered at the 27th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival and received the 2024 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Practice Research Award and the Jean Rouch Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival. Her films have been shown in over 26 countries and at over 100 film festivals, galleries and art venues (Slamdance, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Videoex, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Kings College, University of Boulder, CO). She is also the Founder and Director of Own Story – a trauma informed therapy and expressive arts practice, where healing and creativity belong in the same room

Shorts Program One: Wednesday, October 28th, 6pm
Shorts Program Two: Thursday, October 29th, 6pm

Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complex­ity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s recent works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification, or reference traces of US colonialism in the Philippines.

A featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka, Campbell’s films and art have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and SEA Foundation Tilburg, amongst others. Campbell’s film REVOLVER received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival (an Academy Award Qualifying Festival). Campbell will have their first solo museum exhibition at St. Louis Art Museum in Fall 2024.

Other honors include a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Film/Video, 2022 Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Black Spatial Relics, and a DUKE DocX Fellowship.

Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo.

Shorts Program One: Wednesday, November 11th, 6pm
Shorts Program Two: Thursday, November 12th, 6pm

Kelly Gallagher is an experimental filmmaker, animator, and Associate Professor of Film at Syracuse University. She makes colorful cut-out animations, experimental films, documentaries, and found footage essays that explore political histories of resistance and personal stories of resilience. She has received support for her work from Creative Capital, New York State Council on the Arts, the Wexner, Doc Society, LEF Moving Image Fund, Oscilloscope Films, and Orphans Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award. Her handcrafted films and commissioned animations have screened at venues including: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her commissioned animations have screened on Netflix, Criterion Channel, and PBS. She’s presented solo programs of her work at institutions including: SFMOMA, Close-Up Cinema London, Balkanima European Animation Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Wide Open Experimental Film Festival, and MUTA Audiovisual Appropriation International Festival, among others. Her films are distributed by Canyon Cinema. Kelly enthusiastically organizes and facilitates fun and inclusive film workshops and camps for communities of all ages, every time she gets the chance.

Feature Program: Barbara Forever: Wednesday, January 20th, 6pm
Barbara Hammer Shorts Program: Performing Lesbian: Thursday, January 21st, 6pm

Brydie O’Connor is a Kansas-born, NY based filmmaker. Her work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space. Brydie’s work has been presented at Sundance, Berlinale, BFI, Le Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art, among other festivals and museums worldwide. Her debut feature documentary, BARBARA FOREVER, won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the 2026 Berlinale and was awarded the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Brydie was selected as the recipient of the Creative Capital State of the Art Prize for New York (2026), received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 64th Ann Arbor Film Festival, a Special Mention for the John Schlesinger Award for a First-Time Filmmaker by the Provincetown Film Society, and was named an honoree for The Maysles Documentary Center’s 2026 Albie Awards.

Shorts Program One: Wednesday, February 3rd, 6pm
Shorts Program Two: Thursday, February 4th, 6pm

Kelly Sears is an experimental filmmaker, animator, and educator whose work explores the intersections of history, memory, science fiction, and documentary. Through collage, animation, archival reconfiguration, and hybrid forms of storytelling, she creates films that reimagine cultural histories and speculate on possible futures. Her films inhabit a space where the familiar and the fantastic converge.

Her films have screened internationally at festivals including Sundance, Slamdance, South by Southwest, the American Film Institute Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as museums such as MoMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

Solo programs of her work have been presented at the Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. Her films have received awards from at Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Chicago Underground, and Oak Cliff Film Festivals.

Sears also serves as Director of the Brakhage Center for Media Arts.

Feature Program: Wednesday, March 3rd, 6pm
Feature Program: Powwow People (Directed by Sky Hopinka, Produced by Adam Piron): Thursday, March 4th, 6pm

Adam Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with, and pushing the boundaries, of the moving image. As a film programmer, he has served as a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Film Programming Team since 2013 and was also previously the Film Curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and he has guest-curated film programs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF Lightbox, the Autry Museum of the American West, Metrograph, and various other film festivals and venues. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection’s Current, MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope Magazine, the Metrograph Journal, and CNN.