Canyon Cinema Board of Directors Announces New Executive Director

Posted June 15th, 2020 in News / Events

Brett Kashmere


The Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema is thrilled to announce the appointment of Brett Kashmere as Canyon’s new Executive Director. Brett will replace outgoing Director Antonella Bonfanti, who will continue to serve Canyon as a member of the Board of Directors.

Brett is a film and media artist, curator, and writer living in Oakland. His experience in the independent and experimental film community is vast and varied. Over the past two decades, Kashmere has developed and organized numerous arts initiatives, community projects, and publications in the United States and Canada. He is the founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, an artist-run publication dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. He was also a co-founder of The Antechamber Art Gallery and Cinematheque in Regina, Saskatchewan.

As a film curator, Kashmere has created programs and exhibitions for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Strasbourg, Cinémathèque québécoise, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, Light Cone, TIFF Cinematheque, Images Festival, Vtape, the Seoul Net & Film Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, VIA Festival of Music & New Media, San Francisco Cinematheque, Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, and Cinema Project. 

In addition to his own publications, Kashmere has written widely on experimental cinema and alternative media exhibition for journals and magazines such as Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, MIRAJ, Take One, and Senses of Cinema. He has contributed to edited collections and monographs including Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas, The Films of Jack Chambers, and Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable. He is currently co-editing the anthologies Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! and Strange Codes: The Films of Arthur Lipsett.

Kashmere is also an award-winning filmmaker, having made nearly a dozen short and feature-length experimental and documentary films. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation, the Carol R. Brown Awards, the National Film Board of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Art Board, his work has been exhibited internationally at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, UnionDocs, Kassel Dokfest, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Images Festival, Alchemy, Antimatter, British Film Institute, Conversations at the Edge, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

As a scholar and educator, Kashmere has taught media production, exhibition practices, and film and television history at numerous colleges and universities in both the U.S. and Canada, including Concordia University, Oberlin College, and University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds an MA in Film Studies and an MFA in Film Production from Concordia University in Montreal and is currently completing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

The Board was extremely impressed by Brett’s deep knowledge of the history of Canyon Cinema and its ongoing importance to the international experimental film and video community. His broad experience and skills as filmmaker, scholar, curator, publisher, educator, and media advocate address the various areas that embody Canyon Cinema’s mission. In our discussions, Brett spoke about his commitment as Director to broaden the Canyon community, making it a more inclusive organization, and bringing new kinds of filmmakers and moving image forms into the organization. He made it clear to us that fundraising and adapting Canyon to the new forms of contemporary moving image distribution, exhibition, and technologies, while protecting and preserving the historic 16mm collection are central to his mandate as Executive Director. 

We are very excited to welcome Brett Kashmere aboard!

For more details about Brett’s work, please visit his website: www.brettkashmere.com

Read Brett’s letter to the Canyon Cinema community here: canyoncinema.com/2020/06/15/letter-to-the-canyon-cinema-community/