8/12/21: Virtual Talks with Video Activists: Julie Gustafson

A screening/discussion with filmmaker Julie Gustafson moderated by media scholar Rachel Fabian.

Thursday, August 12th – Virtual talk with Julie Gustafson

1:00p PT / 3:00p CT / 4:00p ET

Free, hour-long screening and discussion

On August 12th, in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Media Burn hosted filmmaker Julie Gustafson for a screening and discussion of her work. Gustafson will screen excerpts from The Politics of Intimacy (1973), Giving Birth (1976), Casting the First Stone (1991), and Desire (2005). The event was moderated by media scholar Rachel Fabian. Topics included early feminist video production, public TV’s intersections w/ activist docs, & collaborative video practices.

Watch a full replay of the event below.

Julie Gustafson is an independent documentary filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of public policy and individual lives. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, many of her works have aired nationally on PBS and have been exhibited in festivals, museums and schools in the U.S. and abroad. Between 1975 and 1989, Gustafson was Co-Director of Global Village, a nonprofit, media arts center based in New York City. She also co-directed The Global Village Annual Documentary Festival, hosted in its later years by Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and the Museum of Modern Art. An educator as well as an artist and curator, Gustafson taught for many years at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She was a member of the graduate and undergraduate faculties of The Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. Most recently she was an Adjunct Professor at Emerson College in Boston.

Rachel Fabian is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. She is a graduate of the doctoral program in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also received her M.A. in 2013. Fabian is the former Managing Editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and also served as the editor of the Media Fields Journal special issue “Access/Trespass.” Her article “Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston,” published in Feminist Media Histories, was awarded the 2020 Annette Kuhn Prize by the journal Screen. Her research examines independent and activist film and video collectives that proliferated internationally during the 1970s–80s and their intersections with feminist politics past and present.