57th AAFF Jurors
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is excited to announce the three distinguished jurors for the 57th festival! These accomplished film artists will dedicate their time during the festival to viewing all 143 films in competition and selecting which films will receive one of the more than 20 filmmaker awards, including the Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival and many more. This year’s three jurors are...
BRYAN KONEFSKY
Bryan Konefsky is the founder and director of Experiments in Cinema international film festival and the president of Basement Films—one of the few remaining first-generation micro cinemas. Konefsky has lectured about alternative cinematic practices in countries such as Argentina, Cuba, Germany, Korea, Morocco, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, and the United Kingdom. Konefskyʼs creative work has been presented at festivals and museums internationally and his creative research has been supported by such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Trust For Mutual Understanding, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker whose work interprets W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her films, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural environments. Owusu’s work has screened at festivals in Rotterdam; Locarno, Switzerland; Toronto; New York (New Directors/New Films); and London (BFI). Her films are part of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and Indiana University Bloomington, home of the Black Film Center/Archive. Her film Kwaku Ananse won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Creative Capital, the MacDowell Colony, the Camargo Foundation, and Goethe Institut Vila Sul in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil. Owusu lives in Ghana and New York, where she is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute.
STACEY STEERS
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. Steers’ films have screened widely at venues including the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno International Film Festival, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She is a recipient of major grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and the American Film Institute and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
