Shari Frilot

The Power of the Erotic: Curatorial Strategies at Sundances New Frontier

Date 2/18/10

Affiliation Filmmaker, Sundance Institute, Salt Lake City

Abstract

With screens and cameras constantly following and watching our bodies, our every day experience is like walking through a fully immersive media installation - except you can't really call it an "installation" because this media environment primarily serves commerce and security over art and culture. New Frontier at Sundance engages with our evolving cinematic environment with an interest in staking a claim for art and independent creative expression. Sundance Film Festival Senior programmer, and curator of New Frontier, Shari Frilot, will talk about curatorial strategies of Sundance's experiment in cinematic presentation and how the art of seduction is used to pave new roads into the imaginations of festival audiences so that they might consider new ways of thinking about their relationship to the cinematic image, and how will they choose to engage with an ever expansive digital media culture.

Bio

An alumna of Harvard/Radcliffe University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Shari Frilot is a filmmaker who has produced television for the CBS affiliate in Boston and for WNYC and WNET in New York before creating her own independent award-winning films, including Strange & Charmed, A Cosmic Demonstration of Sexuality, What Is A Line? and the feature documentary, Black Nations/Queer Nations? She is the recipient of multiple grants, including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Media Arts Foundation. She is presently working on a feature film project about the crisis in water supply with producer Effie Brown's production company, Duly Noted Inc.

In tandem with filmmaking, Shari also maintains a career in festival programming, occupying a distinguished position on the curatorial vanguard through her pioneering development of immersive cinematic environments. As the Festival Director of the MIX festival in New York (1992-1996) she co-founded the first gay Latin American film festivals, MIX BRASIL and MIX MÉXICO film festivals. As Co-Director of Programming for OUTFEST (1998-2001), she founded the Platinum section which introduced cinematic performance installation and performance to the festival. She is presently in her 11th year as a Senior Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival. She is the curator and driving creative force behind New Frontier, an exhibition and commissioning initiative that focuses on cinematic work being created at the intersections of art, film and new media technology.

-- As of 2/18/10