Guest Judge Panel
Friday, April 25, 5-6:30PM, at Art B 102 at Cal Poly Humboldt
Free admission!
Process and positionality in independent film
Hear from our three guest judges who approach their work through narrative/experimental, animation and documentary genres, and how they approch their creative process in relation to identity and positionality.
The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A.
Philip Thompson
Philip Thompson is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, listed as one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2023, and a Sundance x Adobe Ignite and NYFF Artists Academy Fellow in 2024. His work investigates popular media’s influence on culture and the one-sided “looking” relationship between audiences and image subjects. His work has garnered accolades at festivals such as Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Athens International Film+Video Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, and NFFTY, also screening at Palm Springs ShortFest, New Orleans Film Festival, Lago Film Fest, Chicago Underground, and Indie Memphis, amongst others. He is also the co-founder and a programmer of the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival.
Victoria Vincent
Victoria Vincent, known online as Vewn, is an American artist from Los Angeles, California. She has been making independent short films and posting them online for the past 10 years.
Victoria’s work often focuses on the disillusionment and anxiety of characters living distorted and unstable worlds. Her frantic and fast-paced art style seeks to visually capture our chaotic online culture and general feelings of doom. Despite the apocalyptic subject matter, she also hopes to make people laugh.
She has created over 20 short films which have screened at festivals worldwide, as well as been featured on Netflix, FXX, and Adult Swim. Her work is most celebrated on her YouTube channel, which has over 1 million subscribers and over 80 million views. She is currently working on a series of paintings and two new short films about the internet world.
Kaya Dillon
Kaya is a Director, Cinematographer and Producer based in Brooklyn, NY and Arcata, CA. A 2010 graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt, Kaya first discovered the storytelling power of camera traveling with the university's Tibet Field Studies Program. His debut feature film as cinematographer, “All Static and Noise” sheds light on the harrowing experience of the Uyghur diaspora. He is the series cinematographer for the newly released Hulu docu-series “Vow of Silence,” a detailed account of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. “Fox Chase Boy,” his directorial debut, strongly features an impulse for personal storytelling amplified through dynamic photography, multiple formats and cinematic layering. With a constant focus on process and agency of subject, Kaya seeks to engage narratives with the potential to create new perspectives in lived experience.