Jesse Lerner

U.S.

He is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His short films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), T.S.H. (2004), and Magnavoz (2006), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland/ Fronterilandia (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental) and The Fragmentations Only Mean (2021, with Sara Harris) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals, among many other venues. Washington’s National Gallery, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and Mexico’sCineteca Nacional have presented mid-career surveys of his films. His books include The Maya of Modernism, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alexandra Juhasz), The Shock of Modernity, Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America (with Luciano Piazza), and The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz). His critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in Afterimage, Cabinet, Film History, History of Photography, La Pusmoderna, The Spectator, Visual Anthropology Review, Wide Angle, and other media arts journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Mexico’s National Palace of Fine Arts, the MAK Center, and the Carrillo Gil Museum. He is a professor in the Intercollegiate Media Studies program of the Claremont Colleges.

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