Biography
Brett Kashmere is a media artist, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. Over the past two decades, Kashmere has developed and organized numerous arts initiatives, community projects, and publications. He is Executive Director of Canyon Cinema Foundation and the founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media (established in 2008), an artist-run publication dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. Since co-founding the Antechamber Art Gallery and Cinematheque in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1998, Kashmere has continued to generate a cultural impact in each city he’s lived in.
Kashmere’s writing on experimental cinema, moving image art, and alternative media exhibition has appeared in journals and magazines such as Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), PUBLIC, Esse, Take One, and Senses of Cinema; compendiums and anthologies including The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas, Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, and The Films of Jack Chambers; online publications such as the Women’s Film and Television History Network blog and Canyon Cinema 50; as well as commissions for the National Film Board of Canada, Carnegie Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, and Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre. He is currently co-editing the anthologies Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! and Strange Codes: The Films of Arthur Lipsett.
As a curator, Kashmere has created programs and exhibitions for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Strasbourg, La Cinematheque quebecoise (Montreal), Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology (New York), Light Cone (Paris), TIFF Cinematheque, Images Festival, and Vtape (Toronto), the Seoul Net & Film Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, VIA Festival of Music & New Media (Pittsburgh), San Francisco Cinematheque, Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Synoptique Film Journal, Pittsburgh Filmmakers' 3 Rivers Film Festival, and Cinema Project (Portland).
Kashmere’s creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Previous film, new media, textile, installation, and writing projects explored the sociocultural history of basketball and its merger with hip hop, the disconnect between Canadian self-image and hockey violence, traditions of athlete activism, and counterhegemonic sports films and art. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation, National Film Board of Canada, Saskatchewan Art Board, and Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, Kashmere’s films and videos have screened internationally at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives and UnionDocs in New York, the Kassel Documentary Festival in Germany, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, the British Film Institute, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Conversations at the Edge and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Images Festival in Toronto, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, and San Francisco's Other Cinema. His new documentary essay, Ghosts of Empire (co-directed with Solomon Turner, in production), considers the culture and fate of American football at a moment of urgency and change, following discoveries about the risks of traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disease.
Kashmere has taught media production, exhibition practices, and film and television history at Concordia University, Oberlin College, and University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a BA in Film and Video Studies from the University of Regina, as well as an MA in Film Studies and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. He’s currently a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.