2025
“Endless Reveries: Water in Experimental Film“
w/ filmmaker Greta Snider in person
Block Museum of Art
Exploring water as both a sublime and immersive geography and as a troubled and contaminated resource, this program presents a mesmerizing sequence of experimental shorts caught between imagination and matter. The seven films, which include a rapturous seaside montage, an environmental portrait of life around an artificial lake north of Los Angeles, and a delightful trick film send-up of nature’s commodification, chart a lively course through different formal possibilities and expose the simultaneously reflective, unstable, and abstracting properties of both water and experimental filmmaking. Taken together, the films conjugate new perspectives on the perennial relay between water and cinema and offer an expanded visual language for the complicated beauty of nature.

Programmed as a complement to my spring 2025 course, Waterlogs: Global Cinema of the Aquatic.

Chicago Reader feature:
“Submerge yourself in Endless Reveries” by Shira Friedman-Parks

2023
“Crude Aesthetics: Oil on Film“
Block Museum of Art
Across a feast of genres, including melodrama, comedy, thriller, and documentary, the films of Crude Aesthetics: Oil on Film reveal the entanglement of visual culture with the dark progress of the global oil industry during the past century. The power of oil, its predatory optimism, has left a fascinating, contradictory, and sometimes vanishingly subtle record in the history of cinema. Programmed as part of the Kaplan Humanities Center’s “Energies” Dialogues, Crude Aesthetics brings together screenings, talks, and discussions to explore the ways film media of the past century have shaped how we see — or learn not to see — the fuller impacts of our fatalistic dependence on oil.