Film

The MFA in Film is an interdisciplinary endeavor between the Art and Art History Department and the Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts Department and offers the best of both worlds.

We welcome applications from emerging film artists interested in creating fiction or non-fiction cinema, animation, moving image installations, media performance or hybrid time-based works from single channel to the white cube gallery, and beyond.

Students interested in the legacies of cinema history, personal experimental filmmaking, media appropriation, social, environmental and landscape research, projection performance and installation, artisanal film laboratories, and film preservation are sure to find a faculty who are accomplished and ready to engage with them.  

Research and development of Film MFA projects are supported through graduate coursework, studio visits with faculty and visiting artists, a yearly Imagemakers Graduate Seminar, the visiting filmmakers program First Person Cinema, and the annual Brakhage Film Symposium. Some grants available for funding of student projects. Grads are assigned their own studio space amongst their cohort of Arts Practices MFAs of all disciplines.

Film MFAs have access to the full range of cinematic tools from analog to digital: cameras, projectors and sundries, in-house digital-to-film & film-to-digital transfer stations, animation stands and optical printers, a fully stocked computer editing/post-production lab, a fully functioning Steenbeck lab, a chemical darkroom, a new shooting studio, and an in-progress film preservation center.  

Admission to our program is selective and strongly dependent upon the portfolio and we are looking for creative potential in moving image work鈥攏ot a reel鈥攂ut films, videos, sound, installations or media performances you have created and are invested in. Other mediums also encouraged. Tell us what you are passionate about and why, and what you鈥檝e seen that inspires you to work with film and media.

Study and create smart and innovative moving image works in a visual arts program inside a research university. Explore the full range of media materials and processes, integrating studio practice with history and critical studies. Work closely with a faculty of working artists, scholars, and cinephiles.

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Area Faculty

Alumni Spotlight

Adam Sekuler

MFA, Film, 2017

Since the program consists of not just filmmakers, but artists across disciplines, cohort feedback would come from artists working not just in filmmaking, but in photography, ceramics, sculpture, print making, and painting. Moreover, this gave me access to professors working in those disciplines as well.

When I was looking at graduate programs, I applied to a number of schools where I knew the work of the faculty. 欧美口爆视频, at the time, had a number of well known filmmakers; Jeanne Liotta, Phil Solomon, Alex Cox, and Reece August. I admired all of their work, but faculty reputation alone wasn't the deciding factor. Additionally, when I learned that my incoming film cohort would consist of just one other student, I couldn't believe it. Not only would all these wonderful artists become colleagues and mentors over the next few years, but I wouldn't have to struggle to get time with them. Boulder, was unique in other ways as well.

I currently live in New Orleans teaching at Loyola University. My practice remains active with several projects in development. I recently received a major grant from POLIN, a Jewish museum in Poland, to make a new short film for an exhibition that will take place in April of 2022. Additionally, I'm in production on a new feature length documentary called The Flamingo, about a late in life sexual awakening of a 60 year woman in Salt Lake City. I also just completed a short experimental film exploring abandoning a project on the end of the world amidst a global pandemic.

Christin Turner

MFA, Film, 2017

I am living and working as a freelance filmmaker/artist in Berlin. My current project is a feature length essay film, which is an extension of my thesis short 鈥淰esuvius at Home.鈥 Based upon Jungian scholar Linda Fierz-David鈥檚 classic psychological analysis of the Villa of the Mysteries and its frescoes depicting an initiation ceremony for women, and Nor Hall鈥檚 study of the lives of Jungian women analysts to excavate a memoir of cinema, the female self situated in the paradox of destruction, creation, and preservation. 

Christin Turner

I choose the 欧美口爆视频 Boulder MFA program because it was the best value for faculty, equipment, and personal freedom than the other MFA programs I was accepted to. I appreciated that it is interdisciplinary because my video work benefits from the other arts. Furthermore, being located away from filmmaking hubs like Los Angeles or New York, I could focus on developing my own voice as an artist/filmmaker outside of commercial pressure and have access to landscapes or ideas outside of or inaccessible to the typical modes of image-making in America. 

Christin Turner artwork

I remember my first week at the program uncertain if I had made the right choice to be there. I was sitting in a class by the late and great Phil Solomon titled Transcendental Cinema, where we sat in the dark and had the most deeply moving and emotionally resonant images presented before us by a man who loved them as much as a parent loves a child. Eloquence, beauty, and reverence were before me in body, spirit and celluoid. I was humbled and sure that despite any challenges or setbacks that lay before me, or were of my own making, I was ultimately where I needed to be for the type of work I needed to make. 

Christin Turner film still

What Happens to the Mountain (2017) trailer 
Christin Turner, MFA 2018

Dakota Nanton

MFA, Film, 2019

It was amazing to have studio visits with the many visiting filmmakers and artists in the program, I met so many artists I looked up to previously and got to have one-on-one discussions with them.

I was an Alumni of the BFA program in printmaking and had a great experience with supportive faculty and staff in the department. When I decided to pursue my BFA I returned to the MFA program in another discipline in order to expand my career skills and work with the amazing mentors on the faculty and to take advantage of the amazing facilities and resources.

I recently began a career as an Assistant Professor of Cinema at the University of Hartford after completing the prestigious yearlong "Jackie McLean Fellowship". I am currently working on an animated travelogue that is the culmination of five years of research and archival work.