Board of Directors

Maïa Cybelle Carpenter
President, Board of Directors
http://www.mccarpenter.net
Maïa Cybelle Carpenter is a moving-image artist, experimental film curator and professional Executive Assistant. She has been on the Board of Canyon Cinema since 2006. Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally, and selected exhibitions have included: Arts Electronica, The Rotterdam International Film Festival Pacific Film Archive, Ontario Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art Gallery NY, The British Film Institute, Telluride International Experimental Film Festival, The Taiwan Cinematheque, and PBS Television. She has served as visiting curator for the Pleasure Dome in Toronto, Ontario, was the Programming Coordinator for MIX NYC at Anthology Film Archives and has subsequently curated programs for this festival, SF Cinematheque and SF International Film Festival. She has a BA in Women’s Studies/FilmTheory from Barnard College, Columbia University (1997), and has a MFA from the Film/Video/New Media Dept. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001). She is currently the President of the Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema, Inc., on the Advisory Board of Lunafest, ClifBar & Co, a pre-screener for the SF International Film Festival and is the Executive Assistant to the Managing Directors of Elevation Partners, Inc. in Menlo Park, CA.

Nathaniel Dorsky
Vice President, Board of Directors
http://canyoncinema.exobi.com/catalog/filmmaker/?i=95
Nathaniel Dorsky is a filmmaker, educator, and writer. He first joined the Board of Canyon in 2001 and has been re-elected numerous times. Dorsky began to make and exhibit 16mm films within the avant-garde tradition during the early 1960’s and premiered a trilogy at the age of 20 that was written about by Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice. From that time on he continued to make films almost annually in the silent, poetic tradition. These films have been shown and collected by the MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and several universities including Princeton, Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Colorado. He has written and published a well-received book on a philosophy of cinema titled Devotional Cinema, now in its third printing. Nathaniel has received grants from the NEA (3), the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation (2), the LEF Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art. In 2007, ArtForum dedicated a ten-page article to his work. Nathaniel makes a living as a film editor, mostly in the field of documentaries, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and the SF Art Institute.

Dana Plays
Treasurer, Board of Directors
http://www.danaplays.com/
Dana Plays is an award winning experimental filmmaker whose work has been programmed at more than 50 international film festivals and numerous venues including S.F. Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive and the Whitney Museum of Art.  She is currently professor of film and new media at The University of Tampa and has held full time appointments at the San Francisco Art Institute, Syracuse University, Occidental College. She has served on the Boards of Canyon Cinema, Los Angeles Film Forum and the Putney School.

David Sherman
Member, Board of Directors
http://www.totalmobilehome.com/
David Sherman is a filmmaker and media artist, whose appropriation and collage based, experimental films and videos have been exhibited extensively at film festivals, museums and alternative venues throughout the world. Sherman’s 2010 feature cine–essay Wasteland Utopias premiered at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival. His 2002 experimental documentary To Re-edit the World premiered at the 45th San Francisco International Film. Sherman’s Tuning the Sleeping Machine was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and The 34th New York Film Festival. He co-founded Total Mobile Home the world’s first microcinema in San Francisco in 1993. Sherman was Administrative Director of Canyon Cinema from 1989-2001 and was an Adjunct Professor of Media Arts from 1997-2004. He currently resides in Bisbee, AZ., where he is President of Central School Project an artist co-op.

Denah Johnston
Secretary, Board of Directors
http:// website coming soon
Denah Johnston employs optical printing and hand development in her filmmaking, leaving a certain degree of her process to chance operations. Currently Johnston is exploring various methods of re-photography, sound construction and manipulation in her new works with found footage source materials. Influenced by Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Ingmar Bergman and the writings of William S. Burroughs, she has most recently screened films in Berlin, Boston, Sydney, Chicago, Malaysia and St. Petersburg, Russia. Johnston’s film flux received a Juror’s Prize for Best Experimental Film in 2004 at the Athens International Film & Video Festival and in 2009 she won Juror’s Prize for best Experimental Film for Devil’s Dairymaid. In 2010, anomie won best Experimental Film at the Fargo Film Festival.

Having collaborated extensively with artists in various fields, Johnston has been involved in film, interdisciplinary and media arts for over 10 years. Curating film screenings internationally and in the U.S. for six years, she also serves as Experimental and Fringe Film Editor for agnes films (http://www.agnesfilms.com), an online resource for female filmmakers and those interested in their work.

Johnston is also publishing her Dissertation No Future Now: A Nomadology of Resistance and Subversion with Atropos Press (2011) and contributing a chapter about No Wave Filmmaker Vivienne Dick in the forthcoming critical anthology Downtown Film, Video and Television 1975-2000 (2012) from Intellect Press, UK.

Teaching film history and studies courses at the Academy of Art University since 2008, she can be found teaching any number of the following courses: Film History, Genres in Film, analog before digital: punk/no wave film & music, Crossing Borders: Art & Culture in Global Society.  A persistent advocate of film, she is excited to serve on the Board of Directors at such a critical time in the continuing evolution of Canyon Cinema.

She received her PhD in Media Philosophy: Film & Theory from the European Graduate School where she is the Simone de Beauvoir Fellow, an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA in Photography with a Film Studies Minor from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.