Bogawa has made four feature films, I WAS BORN, BUT… (2004), JUNK (1999), and SOME DIVINE WIND (1991) and the most recent film, TAKEN BY STORM – THE ART OF STORM THORGERSON AND HIPGNOSIS (2013) and numerous short films and videos including IF ANDY WARHOL’S SUPER-8 CAMERA COULD TALK (1993), A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE (1988), THE IMAGINED, THE LONGED-FOR, THE CONQUERED, AND THE SUBLIME (1996), and I’M SIMPLY OVERWHELMED, I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY – THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH. GOOD NIGHT (2002) and MEMYSELFANDI (2010).

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He studied art and played in punk bands before turning to filmmaking receiving his MFA degree from the University of California at San Diego studying with director Jean-Pierre Gorin, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and critic Manny Farber. His awards and grants include Creative Capital Foundation, the American Center Foundation, the Jerome Foundation Independent Filmmaker grant, a NYFA fellowship, and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2013, he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that screened fourteen of his films and videos over a week titled IF FILMS COULD SMELL.

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www.roddybogawa.com

@roddybogawa

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist/filmmaker whose work aims to redefine genders, genres, and operating structures. As a net art pioneer, her Brandon (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned by New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her films Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), and Fluidø (2017) defined their own genres of queer sci-fi cinema: ecocybernoia, sci-fi cyberpunk, and sci-fi cypherpunk. Cheang takes on viral love and bio hacking in her current work. Her mixed media installation, 3x3x6, was exhibited at Venice Biennale 2019, representing Taiwan. She is currently working on UKI, an interruptive cinema, through a CNC/DICRéAM grant.

http://mauvaiscontact.info

Artist Yin-Ju Chen interprets social power and history through cosmological systems. Utilizing astrology, sacred geometries, and alchemical symbols, she considers human behavior, nationalism, imperialism, state violence, totalitarianism, utopian formations, and collective thinking. Recently, she has been exploring the material effects of spiritual practices and the metaphysical potentialities of consciousness.

Chen has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals, such as International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL, 2018, 2011), Transmediale (DE, 2018), Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2016), Forum Expanded at 66th Berlinale (DE, 2016), Biennial of Sydney (AU, 2016), "Yin-Ju Chen: Extrastellar Evaluations" (US, 2016), "Action at a Distance–Yin-Ju Chen Solo Exhibition" (TW, 2015), "The Starry Heaven Above and the Moral Law Within" (TW, 2015), Shanghai Biennial (CN, 2014), "A Journal of the Plague Year" (HK, KR, US, TW 2013-2014), Taipei Biennial (TW, 2012).

http://www.yinjuchen.com

Amit Desai is a photographer, filmmaker and sound artist.  He works in NY, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.  Amit’s work explores the intersection of vision, myth-making, and dissolution.

Vincent DiGirolamo is an award-winning historian, journalist, and documentary filmmaker who has taught at Baruch College of the City University of New York since 2003. An associate professor in the Department of History, he specializes in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and print culture. His book, Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019), received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for best book in journalism and mass communication. Born and raised in Monterey, California, DiGirolamo coproduced Monterey’s Boat People, which garnered top honors at several film festivals and was televised nationally on PBS in 1984. He is currently an historical consultant on the forthcoming American Masters series documentary “Becoming Helen Keller.”

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/academics/history/vdigirolamo.htm

https://vincentdigirolamo.com/

Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys

https://vincentdigirolamo.com/

Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. He holds a diploma from the Ontario College of Art, a degree in cinema studies and an MEd in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, teaching courses in Integrated Media and Art and Social Change.

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His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. His single-channel and installation works, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago.

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www.richardfung.ca

James T. Hong is a filmmaker and artist based in Taiwan who has been producing thought-provoking, unconventional, and occasionally controversial films and videos for over twenty years. He has produced works about Heidegger, Spinoza, Japanese biological warfare, and racism. He is currently researching the concept of morality in East Asia.

Helen Lee is an independent filmmaker based in Toronto and Seoul. She emigrated from Korea, where she was born, at age four with her family to Canada. Lee studied English Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Norman Jewison Fellowship for further studies in film. She received her Master’s Degree in Cinema Studies at New York University and attended the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Critical and Curatorial Studies as a Helena Rubinstein Fellow. Through the Academy of Canadian Film and TV’s Director Observer Program, Lee served a directing internship with Atom Egoyan during the making of “Exotica.” She completed her film training at the Canadian Film Centre as Director Resident.

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Lee has made a number of acclaimed films, all of which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her first short film, “Sally’s Beauty Spot” (1990) received an Award of Excellence at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and is screened widely in Asian American cinema classes. “My Niagara” (1992) was awarded a Special Jury Citation for Best Short Film at TIFF. Her CFC thesis film,“Prey” (1995) was an official selection of the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. “Subrosa” (2000) received a Director’s Citation Award from the Black Maria Film Festival. Lee’s debut feature, “The Art of Woo” (2001) was released by Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis domestically and invited to numerous festivals worldwide.

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Prior to filmmaking, Lee was a music critic and contributing editor of the Toronto weekly, NOW Magazine.

Writer/director JON MORITSUGU has been making films since 1985. In 1989, VILLAGE VOICE critic J. Hoberman called Moritsugu’s Brown University thesis short, DER ELVIS, one of the “Top 50 films of the 80’s.”

Since then, his features MOD FUCK EXPLOSION, MY DEGENERATION, FAME WHORE, SCUMROCK, HIPPY PORN and PIG DEATH MACHINE have scorched eyeballs worldwide from Sundance to MOMA to Cannes to the Guggenheim to Berlin to the Whitney to Toronto to name a few. In 1993, James Schamus (former CEO of Focus Features) produced Moritsugu’s television comedy, TERMINAL USA, which aired nationwide on PBS.

Moritsugu has garnered the top award at the New York Underground Film Festival (“Best Feature” 3 times in a row), a Screenwriting Award at the Austin Film Festival and “Oscar Consideration” for his feature, FAME WHORE. He has worked with his wife/leading lady Amy Davis for 20 years, who was co-writer of SCUMROCK and PIG DEATH MACHINE. In 2012, their “No Future Shock” music video for the band TV ON THE RADIO received a GRAMMY NOMINATION in the “Long Form Video” category. In August 2017, principle photography was completed for NUMBSKULL REVOLUTION, Moritsugu’s 8th feature. Shot in New Mexico, the movie is a deconstruction of the world of “kunst” and stars James Duval and Amy Davis as rival conceptual artists.

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http://jonmoritsugu.com/

Spencer Nakasako has four decades of experience as an independent filmmaker. He won a National Emmy Award for a.k.a. Don Bonus, the video diary of a Cambodian refugee teenager that aired on the PBS series P.O.V. and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. Kelly Loves Tony, a video diary about a Iu Mien refugee teenage couple growing up too fast in Oakland, California, also aired on P.O.V. His third film in his trilogy about Southeast Asian youth, Refugee, aired on the PBS series Independent Lens, and garnered major awards at the Hawaii International Film Festival and Hamptons Film Festival. He also wrote the screenplay and co-directed a feature film in Hong Kong, Life is Cheap…but Toilet Paper is Expensive, with Wayne Wang.

Nakasako is the founder of the ground-breaking Media Lab at the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where he collaborated with youth from the neighborhood on filmmaking for seventeen years. Besides consultancies and residencies at Stanford, Harvard, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, USC, UCLA, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the University of Toronto, to name a few, he has lectured in the Social Documentation graduate program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Nakasako is a member of the Writers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Photo by Debbie Lum

Rea Tajiri is a Philadelphia based filmmaker and educator who has written and directed an eclectic body of dramatic, experimental and documentary films currently in commercial and educational distribution. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms. History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, is her 1991 film about the incarceration of American Japanese during World War II told in an essay collage. Strawberry Fields, was a dramatic narrative feature about a young Japanese American woman coming of age during the 1970's in Chicago who embarks on a road trip to explore her families past. Her current project, Wisdom Gone Wild, explores a person-centered approach to caregiving during her sixteen year journey as a care partner to her mother who was diagnosed with dementia. Tajiri has received support for her work through CAAM, ITVS, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, in 2015; a Rockefeller Media Fellowship and was a NYFA Fellow. She is currently an Associate Professor at Temple University.

Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong, educated in Canada and the U.S. and worked in advertising companies and community psychiatric facilities before turning to art. He practices in multiple disciplines including photography, video, painting and print media. His first video, The Yellow Pages, was commissioned by the public art group PUBLIC ACCESS for an installation/projection at the Union Station of Toronto in 1994/95. Since then Tam has produced over 20  experimental videos. He was included in the traveling exhibition Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video by Walker Art Center, Minnesota. His feature documentary film "Books of James" was awarded Outstanding Artistic Achievement (Outfest, LA) and Best Feature Documentary (Tel Aviv LGBT Film Festival). He also publishes several series of artist's books and zines. Currently he is running a bookshop/gallery in Vancouver. This month his work, ‘The Yellow Pages,’ is on exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Tran, T. Kim-Trang was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the U.S. in 1975.  She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990’s.  Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group screenings in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.  Her Blindness Series, eight experimental video shorts investigating blindness and its metaphors, was completed in 2006.  Tran is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Creative Capital grant, a Getty Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, which has enabled her to develop a screenplay based on the life of her mother titled Call Me Sugar, which she hopes to direct as a feature film project.

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Tran is a Professor of Art and Media Studies at Scripps College.