October 2025
Alice Diop
The Pratt Film/Video Department welcomed special guest Alice Diop on October 2nd, 2025. The evening’s discussion and Q&A focused on selected excerpts of her work, and was facilitated by Film/Video Associate Professor Matías Piñeiro.
After obtaining Master’s degrees in History from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2001 and in Visual Sociology (2003), Alice Diop graduated from the Femis documentary workshop in 2005.
Since then, she has been writing and directing creative documentaries which have been shown at a number of international film festivals like the Berlinale, BFI London film festival, Karlovy-Vary, Viennale, Cinéma du Réel etc. In 2017 she won the César for Best Short Film for “Vers la Tendresse” (Towards tenderness) as well as the grand prize at the Brive Festival. In the same year, she won the grand prize in the French competition section at Cinéma du Réel for her feature-length documentary La Permanence (On Call).
Her film Nous, (We), selected for competition at the Berlinale 2021, won the Berlinale’s Best Documentary Award, and the Grand Prize in the Encounters section. It went on to win the Prix Lumière for Best Documentary in 2023, and was a critical and audience success.
Her first feature fiction film, Saint Omer, selected for official competition at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, won the Silver Lion and the Lion of the Future, as well as other awards at numerous international festivals. Saint Omer was also represented France at the Oscars in 2022.
In residence at New York’s Villa Albertine in 2022, she conducted research into the work of African-American poets such as Robin Costes Lewis, Claudia Rankine, June Jordan and Lucille Clinton. In November 2023, the Festival d’Automne in Paris gave her a “carte blanche” to introduce French audiences to the work of these women, in an Afro-Diasporic conversation combining theatrical performances, live shows, film screenings and readings. The public and critical success of the event prompted her to launch her first theatrical production for the 2025 season based on Robin Costes Lewis’s poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems.
April 2025
Mati Diop
The Pratt Film/Video Department hosted special guest Mati Diop on April 21st, 2025. The evening’s discussion with students was facilitated by Film/Video Associate Professor Matías Piñeiro.
Mati Diop is a French-Senegalese filmmaker born in Paris in 1982.
Since her start as a visual artist in the early 2000s and her leading role in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), she has built an eclectic body of work which includes her award-winning short films Atlantiques (2009), Big in Vietnam (2010), Snow Canon (2011), A Thousand Suns (2013), In my room (2020).
With her first feature film Atlantics (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival followed by Dahomey (2024) awarded by The Golden Bear of Berlinale, (both short listed at the Oscars), she has established herself as one of the leading figures of international auteur cinema and a new wave in African and diasporic cinema. Her political and lyrical cinema challenge the boundaries between genres and formats like a reflection of her mixed identity. With the creation of Fanta Sy, a film house based in Dakar, she pursues her artistic commitment on the African continent.
March 2024
Sky Hopinka
The Pratt Film/Video Department hosted an evening of conversation with Sky Hopinka on March 7th, 2024.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His extensively award-winning video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media.
November 2023
Charlotte Wells
The Pratt Film/Video Department hosted an exciting conversation with filmmaker Charlotte Wells, on November 2nd, 2023. The discussion was hosted Professor Dianne Bellino and students in the Fall 2023 Fiction II class.
Charlotte Wells is a Scottish filmmaker based in New York. She is a graduate of the MBA/MFA dual-degree program at NYU where she wrote and directed short films Blue Christmas (2017), Laps (2016), and Tuesday (2016), and produced many more. Charlotte was a Fellow at the 2020 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs with her first feature Aftersun, which premiered in Semaine de la Critique at Cannes in 2022. Aftersun won her the 2023 BAFTA Film Awards for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer, and the 2022 Gotham Independent Film Awards Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award.
October 2023
Anna Boden
The Pratt Film/Video Department was pleased to present an evening with filmmaker Anna Boden in conversation with Professor Eliza Hittman, on October 26th, 2023.
Anna Boden is an American Filmmaker who works alongside Ryan Fleck, her filmmaking partner, whom she has worked with since meeting in college in NYC more than twenty years ago. With roots in documentary and independent film, they are also known for co-writing and directing the billion-dollar box office-grossing film Captain Marvel. In 2006, Fleck and Boden made the award-winning film Half Nelson starring Ryan Gosling, who received an Academy Award® nomination for his performance. They next wrote and directed the independent film Sugar, an introspective sports drama following the life of a talented Dominican baseball player, which won Movie of the Year at the AFI Awards and received a Spirit Award nomination for Best Screenplay. In television, Fleck & Boden directed and executive produced the Emmy Award-winning limited series Mrs. America starring Cate Blanchett for FX and recently finished work on Masters Of The Air, executive produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman for Apple TV+.
April 2023
Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt is an acclaimed feature filmmaker and one of the great, essential talents of American independent cinema.
Her latest film Showing Up, starring Michelle Williams and Hong Chau, premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2022 and opened in theaters in April 2023. Her feature films include: River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meeks Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), Certain Women (2016), First Cow (2019), and Showing Up (2022). Special screenings include the Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Viennale Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Whitney Biennial, and a retrospective of Reichardt’s work at the Center Pompidou in October 2021.
November 2022
Elegance Bratton
Elegance Bratton was born in Jersey City, and raised in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. At age 16, he was kicked out of his home for being gay and spent 10 years being homeless before joining the Marines. He served as a combat camera production specialist in Camp H.M. Smith in Hawaii, shooting videos and taking photographs. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in African American Studies, and received his MFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts for directing and writing.
Elegance is a critically acclaimed documentary and narrative filmmaker. He began his career writing, directing, and producing a variety of projects including the short film Walk for Me, the reality television series My House, and the documentary film Pier Kids, available on the Criterion Channel. His narrative film directorial debut, The Inspection, based on his own experience, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and screened at the New York Film Festival in 2022.
September 2022
Owen Kline
Owen Kline is a New York-based filmmaker, actor, screenwriter and cartoonist, best known for his directorial debut Funny Pages (2022) and his role as Frank Berkman in The Squid And The Whale. Before Funny Pages, Kline directed the delirious Jazzy for Joe (2014) starring the late talk show legend Joe Franklin raising an abandoned baby found on his doorstep. He attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, studying illustration and film.
PREVIOUS VISITING ARTISTS/FILMMAKERS INCLUDE:
- Jessica Kingdon (2022)
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2022)
- Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (2022)
- Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2021)
- Alice Rohrwacher (2021)
- Garrett Bradley (2020)
- Nia DaCosta (2020)
- Brandon Harris (2020)
- Charles Burnett (2020)
- Jeff Preiss (2020)
- Kirsten Johnson (2019)
- Trinh T. Minh-ha (2018)
- Jim Jarmusch (2018)
- Lucrecia Martel (2017)
- Werner Herzog (2017)
- Jeremiah Zagar (2017)
- William Caballero (2017)
- Anna Rose Holmer (2016)
- Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair (2016)
- Terence Nance (2016)
- Edward Lachman (2016)
- Peggy Ahwesh (2015)
- Kelly Reichardt (2015)
- Sam Green (2015)
- Alex Rivera (2015)
- Barbara Hammer (2015)
- Lynne Sachs (2014)
- Travis Mathews and Keith Wilson (2014)
- Peter Snowdon and Bruno Tracq (2014)
- Sebastian Silva (2014)
- Peter Mettler (2013)
- Debra McGuire (2013)
- The Yes Men with Igor Vamos (2013)
- Chico Pereira (2013)
- Eve Sussman (2013)