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—not a reel—but 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’ve 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.
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. CU, 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
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.