Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin explores the effects of digital technologies—everything from online videos to interactive webpages—and examines how people broadcast self-expression on the internet in a sharing economy.

Her extensive body of work has been shown at museums including MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, Creative Time the Whitney Museum and the Tate Museum. Bookchin has been awarded several grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a NYFA New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a MacArthur Foundation Film Grant.

Bookchin was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1962. From 1998 to 2015, she taught in the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts, where she also served as program chair. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Bookchin is an Associate Chair in the Visual Department at Rutgers University.

Long Story Short, winner of the Grand Prize at the 2016 Cinema du Réel Film Festival in Paris, France, addresses people's experiences of poverty, why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today.

Filmed in homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers, Bookchin layers and synchronizes dozens of interviews with an intricate and original multi-image editing technique.

Now he's out in public and everyone can see presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This intricately edited film uses found video footage to explore questions of racism and racial identity in the post-Obama world.

Icarus Films is proud to distribute two films by Natalie Bookchin. Discover more of our featured filmmakers.

Visit Natalie Bookchin's website for more information.


"Natalie Bookchin's acclaimed videos probe the stylistic conventions of documentary and social media to present moving portrayals of individual and collective experience as shaped by the digital age." —Holly Arden, Institute of Network Cultures

FILMS BY NATALIE BOOKCHIN

Over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, and job training centers discuss their experiences of poverty.

Natalie Bookchin | 2016 | 45 minutes | Color | English | Closed Captioned

Online videos diaries are stitched together into a dense, polyphonic essay on race and identity.

Natalie Bookchin | 2017 | 24 minutes | Color | English | Closed Captioned

Natalie Bookchin is an artist and filmmaker who, through virtuosic editing and innovative sonic and visual montage, interrogates the American crisis and its increased inequality and polarization.

Natalie Bookchin | 2017 | 69 minutes | Color | English | Closed Captioned