View the event recording on our Berkeley Arts + Design Vimeo channel. 

Co-presented by the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive.

Renowned filmmaker and video artist, Steve McQueen speaks about his interdisciplinary practice across the art world and in mainstream cinema, focusing on the social, psychological, and political traumas thematized in his work. 

Born in London, England in 1969, Steve McQueen is an artist, film director, and screenwriter currently based in London and Amsterdam. His themes are universal and often focus on painful biographies. McQueen has mastered the art of minimalist storytelling to deliver the utmost impact on his viewers.  In his own words he "wants to put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration." He has directed four feature films, most recently Widows(2018). His first, Hunger (2008), was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his third, 12 Years a Slave (2013), received the Golden Globe, Oscar, and BAFTA awards for best picture in 2014.

Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University. Born in Kenya, and raised in the U.K., Germany, Poland, Tanzania, and the U.S., Bradley’s research and teaching focuses on the study of film and media at the intersections of literature, poetry, contemporary art and performance.  Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in the fields of African American cultural production, as well as the wider black diaspora, expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to global and transnational artistic and cinematic practices.  

Jackson is the Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts + Design and Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. In the fall of 2015, she was appointed to be the first Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design (AVCAD). Her office is responsible for creating new operations and collaborations across departments, centers, presenting organizations, and initiatives in the arts and design for the entire campus.

Kim is The Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art (Africa, Asia & Middle East) at Tate Modern in London where she is responsible for the research, acquisition and interpretation of international art, taking a transnational approach to the presentation of modern and contemporary art histories. Recent curatorial projects include a major survey of the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen; the 2019 Turbine Hall commission with Kara Walker; and A Year in Art: 1973 exploring the artistic and cultural repercussions of the coup d’etat in Chile. She curated Imagined Nations/Modern Utopias for the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and Condemned to be Modern as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST initiative in 2017—both exhibitions examined the contested legacies of modernism through art and architecture.