63rd AAFF Jurors

63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival jurors are accomplished filmmakers, educators, and arts leaders Kristin Reeves, Christopher Harris, and David Lebrun. At the end of the six-day festival, they will award filmmakers with over $36,000 in mostly cash and some in-kind awards. In addition, each juror will present a specially curated program of their own work during the festival. Juror programs are free and open to the public.

Kristin Reeves is an interdisciplinary artist who stages live expanded cinema performances, exhibits electronic and lens-based artworks, and collaborates in professional theater productions. Her creative research interests include the historical use of media, and crossing both clinical and art spaces. She uses editing and material processes to reflect a contemporary understanding of trauma and to express visual narratives of injury and resilience in Bodies for Strength and Power, her live feature-length show. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Centro Cultural de España CDMX, Mexico City, Mexico; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands; CROSSROADS, San Francisco, CA, the Boiler, Brooklyn, NY; and Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago, IL. She has recently been published in Analog Cookbook and Found Footage Magazine. She is an assistant professor of visual studies at Grand Valley State University in the Department of Visual and Media Arts.

A program of Kristin Reeves’s work will show at the Michigan Theater Screening Room on Friday, March 28th, at 1pm: Bodies for Strength and Power: 9X16mm grid-films and experimental shorts by Kristin Reeves

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema, Black literature, and Black music. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged reenactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen-captured video, among other strategies. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films embody the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the US. His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives and the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival in Brazil, solo shows at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, among many others. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature.

A program of Christopher Harris’s work will show at the Michigan Theater Screening Room on Thursday, March 27th, at 1pm: Inventory of Black Roses

David Lebrun came to film from a background in philosophy and anthropology, and many of his films have been attempts to get inside the ways of seeing and thinking of specific cultures. He has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator, and/or editor of more than 100 films on subjects including the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexican folk artists, a 1960s traveling commune, Tibetan mythology, the history of art and science, and the Maya of Mesoamerica. Lebrun combines the structures and techniques of the documentary, experimental, and animated genres to create a style appropriate to the culture and era of each film. His films have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art and numerous international film festivals. He is currently at work on Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, an immersive museum installation project.

A program of David Lebrun’s work will show at the Michigan Theater Screening Room on Wednesday, March 26th, at 1pm: Ritual And Symbol: The Films Of David Lebrun