film curation
Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden
British Film Institute, Southbank, London. June 1-29 2025
22 film season programmed in conjunction with the publication of Elena Gorfinkel's BFI Film Classic on Wanda
Barbara Loden is best known as the director, writer and star of the 1970 US independent road movie Wanda. A stunning work made on the cusp of feminism’s second wave, and Loden’s only feature as a filmmaker, it considers a wanderer who abandons her life as a miner’s wife and mother, electing to drift through America, taking up with several terrible men. Long difficult to see, Wanda has recently gained cult status, emblematic of all the films by women that remain unknown and unseen. This programme takes a deep dive into Loden’s larger film career, creative process and influences. It explores her work as an actor and director in Hollywood, as well as on its margins, alongside Wanda’s cultural, industrial and social contexts. Loden’s life and work open a portal onto 1970s American cinema, replete with ‘mad housewives’ and wayward drifters, and to a moment of feminist urgencies, revealing the stakes of women’s creative labours. The constellation of Wanda’s genealogies and Loden’s legacies continue to inspire generations of filmmakers, writers and artists.
Open City Documentary Film Festival
London, April 2024.
Five screening programme, thirteen films.
Grandma’s Grammar traces the persistence of the
figure of the grandmother as locus of feminist historicity
in non-fiction film, considering the grandmother as cinematic medium and privileged subject for modelling alternative modes of storytelling, inter-generational genealogies, and archives of memory and lived
experience. Drawing together works by Jean-Pierre
Bekolo, Tânia Dinis, Katsuhiko Fukuda, Barbara Hammer, Utako Koguchi, Cecilia Mangini, Gunvor Nelson, Margaret Rorison, Chiemi Shimada, Emilija Škarnulytė, Khady & Mariama Sylla and Naomi Uman, the grandmother
comes into view as nexus and prism of cinematic possibility, sodality and solidarity, and an ethics of kinship within, and beyond, relation.
Kira Muratova: Filmmaker in Profile
Berwick Film Media Art Festival,
Berwick-Upon-Tweed, UK, September 2019.
seven films, co-presented with Dovzhenko Film Centre.
“The Corporeal Avant-Garde in the 1960s”
Christmas on Earth, Barbara Rubin & Couch, Andy Warhol
in 16mm, Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image
London, November 9, 2018
post-screening conversation with Jo Applin & Elena Gorfinkel.
Vibrations (Joe Sarno, 1968) screening &
Lewd Looks book launch.
Close-Up Film Centre,
London, November 2017.
“Triple Play: Benning +Linklater”
three evening screening series
UW-Milwaukee Union Cinematheque,
December 2014.
“An Evening with Peggy Ahwesh”
selection of shorts, with Ahwesh post-screening conversation.
UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre
November 2013.
George Kuchar’s The Devil’s Cleavage
UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre,
October 2013.
Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure
projection performance
Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder
UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre
March 2013.
Light Spill, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder
Moving image installation
UW-Milwaukee Art History Gallery
January 27-February 10, 2011.
Anna Biller’s Viva
filmmaker post-screening conversation.
UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre,
September 2010.
16th MIX: The NY Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film & Video Festival
Festival programming committee
Anthology Film Archives, NY
June-November 2002.
“From MIX with Love”
Co-curated screening
Ocularis, Galapagos Performance Space
Brooklyn, NY
November 2002
SEXperimental
monthlong, four weekend screening series
Co-curated with Bradley Eros, Karyn Riegel, and M.M. Serra
Ocularis, Galapagos Performance Space,
Brooklyn, NY.
November 2001.
