Artist Bios, Contact and Screening Information

ROSS NUGENT Ross Nugent was born in 1980, and came to life upon seeing Kurt Kren’s 2/60: 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi Test in 2001 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, where he was schooled in the emulsion arts. Ross is pursuing an MFA in Film at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin.

Ross is a fellow programmer and UFFer, overseeing the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival this year and next. He makes films that move and films that don’t and sometimes he performs with them.

LISA BARCY Lisa Barcy’s animations have screened all over the world. She has taught all sorts of animation classes around Chicago. She currently teaches at DePaul University.

The creatures on the wall are from Anonanimal which shows on Saturday June 26th at 7:00pm. Lisa’s film The Guilt Trip, or The Vaticans Take A Holiday won Best Animation at the 2004 festival.

DEBORAH STRATMAN
www.pythagorasfilm.com Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based filmmaker and artist interested in landscapes and systems. She works in multiple mediums, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture. Recent and upcoming projects address what Americans mean by ‘freedom’, paranormal occurrences in the information age, adolescent fire-starters, media propagation in southeast Africa, sonic warfare and comets. Stratman has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, the Viennale, the Pompidou, Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festival. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships and she currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Deborah’s film FF is showing in the East Meets West program on Sunday June 27th and her film In Order Not To Be Here won Best Animation at the festival in 2002.

ALEXANDER STEWART
www.alexanderstewart.org Alexander Stewart lives in Chicago. Born in Mobile, Alabama, he graduated from the University of Richmond, and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alexander teaches in the School of Cinema and Interactive Media at DePaul University, and programs a monthly screening series at Roots & Culture gallery.

His film Iceland Spar is in the School of Velocity program on Friday June 25 at 9:15pm and Very Similar To is in the East Meets West Program on Sunday June 27th at 1:15pm.

JAMES FOTOPOULOS
www.jamesfotopoulos.com
www.fantasmainc.com The work of James Fotopoulos has shown internationally at many festivals and sites including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Underground Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among others. In 2002 he had a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives and was exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 he received a Creative Capital Grant for his video on the life of Richard Nixon, published a book of drawings, The Lime Book and completed an installation for the 2005 Contour Biennial for Video Art. The Hard-Boiled Egg, produced from an unpublished screenplay by Eugene Ionesco, premiered at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2006. In 1998 he founded the production company Fantasma Inc. and recently partnered in Thermidor Releasing Inc.

James has had numerous films and videos in the festival including the award winning Migrating Forms and our 2001 Opening Night film Back Against The Wall.

RAY PRIDE
thisis606.blogspot.com “The films never made: they are like someone’s last, unheard words, lost notebooks. No light will project them, no one will endlessly imitate their lines. In the invisible universe where everything we know has its opposite, these unmade films will be playing and the others will only be dreams, in which, as might happen if we could rewrite history, the world would be better.†– James Salter These photographs are part of “this is 606,†a project about Chicago. (thisis606.blogspot.com)

In addition to covering the festival for NewCity and Filmmaker Magazine, Ray has been a programming consultant for the festival for many years. In 2006 he and Amy Cargill co-directed the festival’s trailers.

MICHAEL ROBINSON
www.poisonberries.net Since the year 2000, Michael Robinson (b.1981) has created a body of film, video and photography work exploring the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience. His work has been shown internationally in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques, museums and galleries. Originally from upstate NY, he holds a BFA from Ithaca College, a MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University. Michael was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts for Fall 2009, and was listed as one of the top ten avant garde filmmakers of the 2000’s by Film Comment magazine.

His film If There Be Thorns is in “The Unconscious Uncorked†program on Sunday June 27 at 6:00pm. In 2008 he won best music video for his karaoke video Hold Me Now.

JON.SATROM
jonsatrom.com Jon Satrom performs realtime audio/video, spends time data-bending, makes kludgey work-flows, creates colorful glitch-ware, and enjoys working within collaborative projects and open systems. He spends his days fixing things, making things work, and teaching. He spends his evenings breaking things, learning, and searching for the unique blips inherent to the systems he explores and exploits.

Jon charmed audiences with MEHOH (VR1a) in 2009, his first CUFF appearance.

LILLI CARRÉ
www.lillicarre.com
Lilli Carré was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Chicago. Her animated films have screened in festivals throughout the US and abroad, and her books of comics are Tales of
Woodsman Pete, The Lagoon, and Nine Ways to Disappear. She also contributes comics to the Fantagraphics anthology Mome and to The Believer magazine. Bits of her work can be seen at www.lillicarre.com.
Lilli designed the artwork for CUFF 2009 (which can be seen on the CUFF poster wall). She also won best animation in 2006 for her film How She Slept At Night.

ROBERT TODD
www.roberttoddfilms.com Robert Todd began making films in the midst of a life-long game of tag between Drawing and Painting. in 1998 he rather crassly abondoned both of these rather taciturn parent-forms, turning his full attention to rearing the rather challenging child-form on a steady diet of rolls – both 16mm and Super 8.

His film Golden Hour is in The Unconscious Uncorked program on Sunday June 27 at 6:00pm. Robert has had over a dozen films in CUFF over the past 11 years starting with Fable: I Want the World Clean in 1999.

LORI FELKER- curator, organizer
www.FelkerCommaLori.com Lori chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants. She currently lives, makes films/videos, teaches, projects, volunteers for film festivals, and compulsively collaborates in Chicago.

Her video This Is My Show is in The Television Personalities program on Saturday June 26th at 9:30 pm.