Apr 19, 2006

Posted by Renew Media

New York, NY – National Video Resources (NVR) is proud to announce the
recipients of its Media Arts Fellowships. Awarded annually for 19 years,
the Fellowships recognize the artistic excellence of 20 film, video and new
media artists in the United States with cash awards of $35,000 each. For
the third year, two additional Fellowships of $7,500 each acknowledge
emerging artists working in film and video whose work shows exceptional
promise. Since its establishment by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988,
the Media Arts Fellowships program has awarded nearly $10 million to 300
gifted media artists working in a variety of genres in the U.S. and is
known as one of the most prestigious grants in the media arts.

Brian Newman, Executive Director of NVR, noted “Those nominated for
the 2006 Media Arts Fellowships represent some of the most important
media artists working in the country today. From emerging artists to
those more established in their careers, from documentarians to artists
using software as their medium, they represent a wide array of artistic
vision, and we congratulate them all.”

This year’s group of 22 Fellows includes Oscar- and Emmy-nominated
filmmaker Arthur Dong and his new documentary investigating the
history of the Chinese in American feature films; Kelly Dobson and her
project exploring communication between humans and robots; and Sterlin
Harjo, whose narrative tells about a young Seminole man on a journey
toward self-awareness in Oklahoma. Additionally, Fellowships were
awarded to documentarians Keith Beauchamp, Liz Mermin, Mylène
Moreno, Meena Nanji, Ian Olds, Anayansi Prado and Sheila Sofian; new
media artists Ben Fry, Shih Chieh Huang, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar,
Ruben Ochoa, and Julia Reodica; fiction filmmakers Nanobah Becker,
Selena Burks and Debra Granik; and experimental makers Andrew
Blubaugh, Ernie Gehr, Beatriz Santiago and Soon-Mi Yoo. (See “More”
for brief descriptions of the Fellows’ funded projects and bios.)

Tania Blanich, Director of the Program for Media Artists, noted that among
the 2006 Fellows is Ian Olds, who had been nominated for the Fellowship
with his filmmaking partner Garrett Scott. Tragically, Mr. Scott died of a
heart attack at age 37 in early March, shortly after the panel had
recommended the team for funding, and merely two days prior to winning a
2006 Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award for Occupation
Dreamland. “Scott was considered a talented and promising filmmaker by
both peers and audiences,” said Blanich. “We at NVR are pleased to
support Ian in what would have been their next documentary together.”

Past recipients of the Fellowships include 2005 Sundance winners Ira
Sachs Forty Shades of Blue) and Craig Brewer ( Hustle and Flow); Charles
Burnett ( To Sleep with Anger); video installation pioneer Shigeko Kubota,
widow of Nam June Paik; and documentarian Ross McElwee (Sherman ’s
March). The full list of Fellows can be found at www.MediaArtists.org.

NVR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1990 by the Rockefeller
Foundation. The organization fosters independent artistic expression by
supporting the creation, dissemination and public awareness of
independent media in all forms. The cornerstone of its support for artists
is the Media Arts Fellowships, which support the creation of new work
that brings innovation to the media arts. The Rockefeller Foundation and
the Ford Foundation are key funders of the program.

Further information about NVR can be found at www.nvr.org.
2006 MEDIA ARTS FELLOWS The Media Arts Fellowships support
artists working in narrative, documentary, experimental, installation or
work that centers on dynamic, computer-mediated media, such as web art,
robotics, virtual reality, and interactive installations. An asterisk * next to
the individual’s name indicates a recipient of an Emerging Artist Fellowship.

KEITH BEAUCHAMP
Brooklyn, NY
Whispering Winds explores the growing epidemic of hanging
deaths of African-American men in the deep South. Previously, Beauchamp
spent nine years researching the Emmett Till case. The resulting debut
documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, was cited by the US
Department of Justice as a major factor in their 2004 decision to reopen the
case. In 2005, he was awarded the National Board of Review and Motion
Picture’s Freedom of Expression Award.

NANOBAH BECKER
New York, NY
Full is a fiction film about a 27-year-old gay ( nadleeh)
Navajo man forced to return home to the queer Native American nightlife
culture of Albuquerque, New Mexico after failing as a disc jockey in New
York City. Becker is a Navajo writer and director ( Flat) who graduated
from Brown and the Directing MFA program at Columbia University, and
was a 2005 Sundance Fellow.

ANDREW BLUBAUGH
Portland, OR
Scaredycat, a short experimental documentary exploring the
role fear plays in our lives, takes as its point of departure the filmmaker’s
response to an incident in which he was mugged and beaten. Blubaugh’s
experimental documentaries have screened at Sundance and other notable
festivals. He is an instructor at Northwest Film Center in Portland.

SELENA BURKS
Cincinnati, OH
Fuse melds fiction and documentary to tell the story of a
young woman’s erratic teenage years as a runaway, based on the life of
the filmmaker’s foster sister. Burks’s first film, Saving Jackie, a
documentary portrait of her mother’s spiral out of crack-cocaine
dependence, premiered at Sundance 2005. She graduated from Wright
State University.

KELLY DOBSON
Cambridge, MA
Companion Projects is a collection of robots with
complicated psychological states, such as anxiety or other neuroses,
in an on-going exploration of how to facilitate empathic communication
between machines and humans. Dobson, a doctoral student in the MIT
Media Arts and Sciences program, has exhibited her work internationally,
including at ISEA in Helsinki and Tallinn, The Kitchen in New York, and
the Millennium Museum in Beijing.

ARTHUR DONG
Los Angeles, CA
The Chinese in Hollywood Project documents the visual
and social history of the Chinese in American feature films since the early
1900s. Dong is a 1994 Fellow whose films have earned him a George
Foster Peabody Award, three Sundance Film Festival awards (including the
Directing Award for the Fellowship-funded documentary Licensed to Kill),
an Oscar nomination and five Emmy nominations, among other honors. He
serves on the National Film Preservation Board and the Board of Governors
at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, representing the
Documentary Branch.

BEN FRY
Cambridge, MA
Processing, an open source programming language that
teaches the fundamentals of computer programming for images, animation
and sound, supports and expands the artist’s own work while providing a
wide community of artists with the tools to advance their own work. Fry is
currently working on visualization of genetic data at the Broad Institute at
MIT. His work has appeared at the Whitney Biennal, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York and Ars Electronica, and in several Hollywood films.

ERNIE GEHR
San Francisco, CA
On Location is an experimental video that traces the
topography of New York City, playing with time as it investigates history and
the continual metamorphosis of the urban landscape. Gehr teaches at the
San Francisco Art Institute. His films have screened internationally, including
retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Rotterdam International Film Festival; and
the San Francisco Cinematheque.

DEBRA GRANIK
New York, NY
Church Ave. is a fiction film that tells the story of a pivotal year
in the life of a young streetwise Brooklyn man. Granik’s debut feature, Down
to the Bone, won the Dramatic Direction Award at Sundance in 2004 and
has screened at festivals, including Deauville, Locarno and Pusan. She
graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate film program.

STERLIN HARJO
Tulsa, OK
Four Sheets to the Wind follows a young Seminole Indian
man ashe sets out on an offbeat journey of mourning for his father and
learns about living life, one day at a time. Harjo, himself Seminole, was
one of the first five Annenberg Film Fellows at the Sundance Institute.
His short film Goodnight, Irene premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film
Festival, and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, among
others.

SHIH CHIEH HUANG
New York, NY
POF- TTN 06 is an interactive installation in which
found and collected objects — including toys, electrical devices and
sensors — are reassembled in a way that subverts their intended
function and causes the viewer to look anew at the familiar materials
that surround us. Huang’s work has exhibited at museums and
galleries worldwide, including the Tokyo National University of Fine
Arts and Music; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Burgos, Spain;
and the New Museum in New York.

PAUL KAISER and SHELLEY ESHKAR
New York, NY
Playground is an interactive installation that explores
children’s natural movements and the structured choreography and
social patterns they create when at play. Using motion-capture and
artificial intelligence, the installation will react in direct response to
participants. Kaiser, a Guggenheim Fellow, has taught at several
universities and been an artist-in-residence around the country.
Eshkar, a multimedia artist and experimental animator, has explored
three-dimensional figural drawing and animation, particularly using
motion-capture technology. The two have worked together for
eleven years, and are known for their digital dance works with
choreographers such as Bill T. Jones and Merce Cunningham.

LIZ MERMIN
New York, NY
Believers looks at the nature of faith in the
contemporary United States. Mermin’s recent documentary The
Beauty Academy of Kabul played at numerous festivals
internationally, was broadcast on BBC2 and across Europe, and is
currently in theaters across the US. She is a graduate of both
Harvard and New York University.

MYLENE MORENO
Los Angeles, CA
Home Team documents the fans of Chivas USA
during the Major League Soccer club’s second season in 2006.
Moreno’s recent documentary Recalling Orange County, which
reflected on her experience growing up as the daughter of immigrants,
has been screening at festivals and will be broadcast this fall on public
television during the inaugural season of VOCES. She studied at both
Harvard and Stanford.

MEENA NANJI
Santa Monica, CA
Told through the eyes of three Afghan women —
a doctor, a teacher and a women’s rights activist — View from a Grain
of Sand reveals how war, international interference and the rise of
religious fundamentalism have stripped Afghan women of rights and
freedom. Nanji, based in Los Angeles and New Delhi, has produced and
directed a number of experimental and documentary works. She received
a Media Arts Fellowship in 1995.

RUBEN OCHOA
Los Angeles, CA
Class: C’s Vancade is a 2-D video game inspired by the
evolving role of the artist’s van from street vending vehicle to a mobile
artists’ space. The game — combining a mid-1980s esthetic with today’s
multi-faceted gaming capabilities — allows the player to sell tortillas and
fund art exhibits as they navigate the streets of Los Angeles. Ruben Ochoa,
an artist whose work often explores the interjection of art into unsuspecting
environments, received his MFA from UC-Irvine.

IAN OLDS
New York, NY
Frontier studies 21 st Century state intervention, glimpsed
through the eyes of various agents working in and around a U.S. Special
Forces camp in post-conflict Afghanistan. Olds was nominated for a
fellowship along with his filmmaking partner Garrett Scott, who died in early
March 2006. They had co-directed Occupation Dreamland, about American
soldiers in Iraq, which won a 2006 Independent Spirit Award. Olds directed
the fiction short Two Men, an official selection of the 2005 Clermont-
Ferrand International Film Festival and Best Short winner at the 2005
Woodstock Film Festival.

ANAYANSI PRADO
Los Angeles, CA
Children In No-Man’s Land uncovers the plight of the
100,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S./Mexico border every
year. Born in Panama, Prado moved to the United States as a teenager.
Her debut documentary Maid in America, about Latina immigrant women
working in Los Angeles, screened nationally on the PBS Independent
Lens series in Fall 2005. Prado received her BA in Film from Boston
University.

JULIA REODICA
Troy, NY
hymNext: The Living Sculptures Project is an installation that
comments on modern sexuality, confronts the traditional roles of the female
body and presents a collection of synthesized hymens. The unisex hymens
are sculpted with living materials into a variety of designs for application on
the human body. Along with laboratory imaging and informational kiosks,
Reodica uses the intersection of art and science to expand public
understanding of the possibilities for medical and scientific arts in a time of
emerging technologies.

BEATRIZ SANTIAGO*
San Juan, PR
Glosario | Glossary is an experimental film about incomprehension,
language and invention made with speakers of Nicaraguan Sign Language.
This new, gestural language developed spontaneously when deaf children
from different parts of Nicaragua were brought together in the first
school for deaf children in the country. Santiago lives and works in
Puerto Rico, creating absurdist improvised performances that comment
on social relations. Her work has shown in the US and abroad, including
the Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, ApexArt and e-Flux in
New York, and Museo de Arte Moderno de República Doimnicana and
Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Latin America.

SHEILA M. SOFIAN
Pasadena, CA
Through animation and live action, Truth Has Fallen will follow the work
of James McCloskey, whose mission is to free prisoners wrongfully
convicted of murder. Sofian is an animator and documentary filmmaker
whose award-winning films have shown at film festivals internationally.
She is Department Chair of the Animation Program at College of the
Canyons in Santa Clarita, CA.

SOON-MI YOO*
Syracuse, NY
Jimmy’s Reward imagines the life of a Korean boy whose brief service as a
Navy “mascot” during the Korean War is documented in seven photographs
at the U.S. Navy archive. The search to find Jimmy invokes the historical
landscape of the Korean War and addresses the complex issues of
personal and national identity. Korean-born Yoo’s work has been
exhibited at festivals and galleries internationally. She has been awarded
several residencies and fellowships, including from the American Photography
Institute.

Original post:
http://news.renewmedia.org/2006/04/19/nvr-awards-715000-to-22-us-media-artists/