Born in Roanoke, Virginia, Rian Brown is a filmmaker, video artist, and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and New Media at Oberlin College. She grew up in a family of artists and as a child lived in many different parts of the U.S., studied art at the Massachusetts College of Art and received her Masters of Fine Arts in film from the University of California, San Diego. Brown's work spans a variety of film genres -- including experimental, personal narrative, documentary and video installation -- and explores notions of motherhood, identity, landscape, memory, and nostalgia in both narrative structure and visual style. Reflecting Brown's background in painting, her films also deploy rich, visually dynamic imagery, hand-painted animation, and experimental techniques. Presence of Water, a short 16 mm film Brown shot in Northern Italy, is a visual diary and memory of the last few months of pregnancy that has shown widely in festivals, including the Independent Film Channel, the New York Shorts Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Nashville International Film Festival, and the Women in the Director's Chair. Recently she completed Into the Scrum, a short documentary that takes an intimate look at the complex and physical world of women's rugby. In 2009 she travelled to Antarctica with filmmaker and frequent collaborator Geoff Pingree to film BLUE DESERT ~ Towards Antarctica, a multi-channel video installation that premiered at Boston's Laconia Gallery and has since shown at Oberlin's Baron Gallery and Cleveland's Ingenuity Festival. Her work has shown around the world at film festivals and museums including the Wexner Center, L.A. Hammer Museum of Art, the Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, and the Milano-Athenia in Athens. Brown was an artist in resident at the Headlands Center of the Arts, and in 2011 she was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. With Pingree she also founded and directs the Apollo Outreach Initiative, a media education and community outreach program housed in Oberlin's historic Apollo Theater.

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