William A Brown, Visiting Associate Prof in Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and and Art of the Moving Image

Please note: William has left the "MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Bill Brown likes to travel. But his favorite destinations lie along the back-roads and quiet corners of the American landscape: places over and under-looked, the hidden and the long forgotten. Sometimes he pays particular attention to landmarks deliberately kept out of sight: like North Dakota’s ominous ICBM missile silos (featured in the film “Buffalo Common”); or the treacherous US/Mexico borderlands (the focus of his recent “The Other Side”). Wherever he finds himself, Bill has a way of looking and listening that allows space to gradually reveal the crucial fragments of its shuttered self. Through his carefully composed imagery and his emotionally vivid, storyteller’s voice, Bill Brown coaxes the buried memories and restless ghosts from under the wayward historical markers of West Virginia (“Mountain Sate”) or the near-cosmic, castaway road-stops of the Trans-Canada Highway (“Confederation Park”). In his films, hand-made zines (Dreamwhip #’s 1 – 14), a book (“Saugus to the Sea”), and recent live performances, the people and places he describes are never denied their fundamental mystery; instead Bill invites us to join him in a thoroughly absorbing conversation he is having with the people and places that he meets. It’s one of those conversations where it’s so easy to lose track of time. -Luke Sieczek, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle

Contact Info:

Office Location:	A219 (Bay 12) Smith Warehouse
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://www.heybillbrown.com

Education:

M.F.A.

California Institute of the Arts

1997

Specialties:

Production - Documentary
Production - Narrative
Production - Experimental Film
Production - Sound