Following a review of nearly 200 outstanding applications by our group of project advisors, it is with great excitement that we introduce the 2021-22 Canyon Cinema curatorial fellows: 

Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer, editor, and film curator based in Toronto and New Delhi. He has contributed writing to Canadian Art, The New Inquiry, Ethnic Aisle, Trinity Square Video, South Asian Visual Arts Centre, and FADO Performance Art Centre, among other platforms. Aaditya has worked at organizations such as Mercer Union, Images Festival, Regent Park Film Festival, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. His work seeks to blur the lines between creative nonfiction and narrative forms. “Matching the pacing of vibrant commercial breaks, lo-fi animation, snowy screens, rainbow screens, glitching audio beats, and Public Service Announcements,” Aaditya’s Discovered program “will mime daily televisual mass media programming, intertwining the economics of anticipation, physicality, annoyance, and tactility.”

Juan Carlos Kase is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he teaches courses in the history of experimental film and video, as well as documentary, Third Cinema, cult genres, and film theory. In his published scholarship and academic presentations, he has focused on revising the dominant, canonical narratives of the North American avant-garde. His writing can be found in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Millennium Film Journal, The Moving Image, and OCTOBER, together with numerous anthologies related to the avant-garde and intermedial topics. His ongoing research concerns the overlapping aesthetic, historical, and political registers of non-industrial cinema, art history, performance, and music within American culture. Before pursuing academic work in Film Studies, he worked as a producer and archival researcher of historical jazz reissues for The Verve Music Group, RCA/Bluebird, and Revenant. For Discovered, Carlos’s program “will explore the ways in which experimental cinema has drawn from African American improvised music, with particular attention to the political energies of this rich union.”

Chrystel Oloukoï is a writer, researcher, and curator, broadly interested in time, temporality, policing, and the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in Black continental and diasporic contexts. She is a Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University, holds a MA in Geography from the university Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and is an alumni of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. She is currently co-curator of Is That Jazz, a nomadic panafrican microcinema in Lagos, inflected by Black continental and diasporic films and debates on the decarceration of Black arts, and occasionally writes for BFI and Sight & Sound. Chrystel’s Discovered program will consider “[the theme of] opacity in capacious terms, presenting experimental films which expand our idea of what the night or the dark represents, play with the idea of the gaze, subvert and refuse expectations of transparency, spectacle, and voyeurism, especially in relation to marginalized subjects, thinking about discontinuity, gaps, the redacted and the missing as sites of possibility.”

Ekin Pinar is an Assistant Professor in the Architecture Department at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She received her Ph.D. from the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation titled “Canyon Collective Artists: Micropolitics in West Coast Experimental Film, 1960-79.” Her work has appeared in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Film Criticism, the essay collection Mobility and Fantasy, and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Ekin’s current research focuses on histories of expanded cinema and moving image exhibition spaces and practices. For Discovered, Ekin’s program “will highlight how the dynamic conflictual force field of collective protest found its expression in a wide range of formal techniques and experimental, found footage, as well as expository documentary modes.”

About Canyon Cinema Discovered

Aiming to bring fresh perspectives to experimental media curation, this year-long program will support four curatorial fellows as they assemble programs from Canyon’s unique collection of artist-made films for online streaming in spring 2022 and a possible screening tour (conditions permitting). Each fellow will curate their own program of works chosen from both inside and outside of Canyon’s holdings and write accompanying essays to be published on Canyon’s website and in a printed catalog. Fellows will also have the opportunity to catalyze new exhibition prints and digitizations of selected works as part of the program. Additional info: bit.ly/cc_discovered

Project Advisors: Christopher Harris, Steffanie Ling, Adam Piron, Lynne Sachs

Project Funders: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, and the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation