Recycled Screenings (January 2023 - Present)
A platform for found footage and other moving image artists to screen their work and accept donations. Each monthly screening features a conversation between me and the creator(s) and written statements by the creator(s) and me. Former guests include: Scout Tafoya, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, and Dayna McLeod. Learn more here: www.recycledscreenings.com. Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist (June 2020 - September 2021)
After the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Kevin B. Lee, Cydnii Wilde Harris, and Will DiGravio began curating the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist, a collection of more than 100 audiovisual works that reappropriate existing media to critically examine race, systemic racism, police brutality, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and other pertinent topics. Selections from the playlist have screened at festivals and academic conferences. The playlist and links to the festival events can be accessed here.
- Named the best video essay project of 2020 by the editors of Sight & Sound
- Curated Screenings for Film Festivals: Open City Documentary Festival (London), Camden International Film Festival (Camden, Maine), FilmFest Dresden (Dresden, Germany)
- Curated Screenings for Film Festivals: Open City Documentary Festival (London), Camden International Film Festival (Camden, Maine), FilmFest Dresden (Dresden, Germany)
The Journeys of Cary Grant: An Audiovisual Celebration (November 2020)
"The Journeys of Cary Grant: An Audiovisual Celebration" was a partnership between the Cary Comes Home Festival, based in Bristol, UK, and The Video Essay Podcast. On November 20, 2020, seven essayists joined Festival Director Charlotte Crofts and Will DiGravio, host of The Video Essay Podcast, for a live conversation as part of the Cary Comes Home Festival. Watch the conversation and all of the video essays here.
Videographic Homework (Spring 2020)
In the spring and summer of 2020, listeners of The Video Essay Podcast were assigned the core videographic exercises developed by Jason Mittell, Christian Keathley, and Catherine Grant for the Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop at Middlebury College. All of the exercises are outlined in their online book, The Videographic Essay: Practice & Pedagogy. Listeners created more than 70 unique audiovisual works as part of this collaborative project. Nearly all of them can be found here.
Sight & Sound Best Video Essays of 2019
Since 2017, Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, has published a poll of the year's best video essays. I was asked to co-edit the 2019 list with Grace Lee and Ariel Avissar. The article features an introductory essay and contributions from 39 leading practitioners of the form. Read here.
The three of us discussed curating the 2019 poll on The Video Essay Podcast. Listen here.
