Background
Professor Ariana Gerstein is a Guggenheim Fellow (2024) and has taught at Binghamton University since 1999.
She received her BA from Binghamton University, where she studied with acclaimed experimental filmmakers and Cinema Department founders Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim. She received an M.F.A. from the School of Art Institute of Chicago with the prestigious Trustees Merit Scholarship.
Her independent productions have included experimental documentary approaches and projection/installation work. Gerstein uses the mechanics of process to explore how we create and consume cinema. Using non-traditional methods for making and showing movies can encourage us to see and experience a wider potential for working with time, allowing for opportunities to digress, reconsider, recycle, complicate and slow down, affecting the way we represent our world and our relationships.
Her films have been screened at such venues as the MOMA; San Francisco Cinematheque; the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Deutsches Filmmueseum, Frankfort; the Pacific Film Archives in Berkley; the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam; London International; the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Germany; Media City in Canada; New York Film Festival; SXSW and others. Awards for her work include the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film and Most Innovative Innovative Film Awards from Ann Arbor Film Festival, a Golden Gate Film Award from San Francisco International FIlm Festival, and the Special Jury Award for Artistry in Documentary at Atlanta Film Festival, among others.
Gerstein's work has also received support from the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship in 2008, as well as grants from the New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation of the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Experimental documentaries Alice Sees The Light and Milk in The Land were nationally broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. She has served on the Artist Advisory Board of the New York State Council of the Arts and is on the artist advisory board of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Education
- MFA, Art Institute of Chicago
- BA, Binghamton University
Research Interests
- Alternative Processes
- Experimental Animation
- Documentary Approaches
- Projection Mapping
