See my CV Here

Jeffrey Skoller born New York, NY, 1958, is an artist/filmmaker, writer and curator. 

In research and image-making, I explore relationships between film and contemporary art, the radical aesthetics and praxis of the political avant-garde; representations of history and time in experimental film and video, and contemporary cinematic hybrids such as the essay film, experimental documentary, animated documentary and expanded cinemas.

From the beginning I was interested in the relationships between aesthetics, politics and the integration of theory and practice. How to bring into dialogue the questions of  art and media activism with theoretical questions about the politics of aesthetics and representation. These questions were central to advanced cultural practices when I began my education. Godard’s mantra of the 1970s: “Not to make political films, but to make films politically, has always been central to my work both as a scholar, filmmaker and educator.  I have explored these questions through my practices in critical writing, creative image-making and pedagogy. My education showed me that it was possible to move away from the specialization of either the practitioner or scholar, and to freely move between them allowing one to inform and build on the other. I was lucky to begin my studies in film and art in the late 1970’s when there was a turn toward critical theory in art. I went to London and studied at St Martin’s College of Art with filmmaker and writer Malcom LeGrice and the structural materialist filmmakers working out of the London Film Co-op. The heady debates about radical practice and the politics of representation that went on among and between both the filmmakers and scholars in London was galvanizing and filmmakers like LeGrice, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen, Yvonne Rainer and others were models for the possibility of trespassing these disciplinary lines. In the 1980s, in New York, I worked collectively with other artists and media activists in groups that included Xchange TV, and DeepDish Television, RepoHistory and Political Art, Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) a study group of artists, scholars and cultural activists who were similarly trying to find connections between critical theory and creative practice and cultural activism. In this context I began to understand the creative possibilities  of praxis as a form of politics. In books, film and media projects and my teaching, I’ve tried to embody the idea of trespass and the free movement across disciplinary and aesthetic boundaries to discover news ways of making film politically. 

        My films, video and photographic installations have been exhibited in independent cinemas, museums, universities and festivals internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute of Chicago, Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, The SF Cinematheque; Museum of the Moving Image, NY; JP Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Whitney Museum, NY; P.S. 1, NY; Anthology Film Archives, NY; Flaherty Film Seminar, NY; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Mannheim Film Festival, Germany; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. 

        My essays and articles on experimental film and video have appeared in numerous anthologies, artist catalogues and in journals including Film Quarterly; Discourse; Representations; Afterimage; Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Cinematograph; New Art Examiner, Art Practical World Records, as well as essays in numerous anthologies. He is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg.

       As a teacher and educator of art and cinema from 1988 to 2023, I taught at colleges and Universities across the US. I was part of the founding faculty of the Dept. of Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program at Wellesley College. I taught full and part time at The William Paterson University of New Jersey, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA, UC San Diego, and for the last 20 years I taught  in the Dept of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, where I am currently Emeritus Professor. 

     I designed and taught a range of Undergraduate and Graduate courses in both film/video production, film studies. In addition to production courses in Documentary and Avant-garde film; I taught surveys in the history of Avant-Garde Film, and Documentary Film, Experiment and Exploration: The Bay Area Experimental Arts Underground, The Religious Imagination In Cinema, From History To Entropy: Making History in Cinema; Brakhage/Godard: Reinventing Cinema; New African Cinema, Post-Yiddish Cinema; Committed Cinema: Film/Media, Art and Social Change; “The Image of Labor: Work, Film, Media and Resistance!, Documentary Film Now! Explorations in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film & Media, Graduate Seminars including The Image of Time: Cinematic Temporalities, The Art of the Electronic Image, Political Modernism and Beyond: Radical Formalism in Film and New Media, “Mediatized War: Vision, Technology and the Spectacle of Violence in Contemporary Non-Fiction Media among others

      As a film/video curator, I have curated dozens of film programs and film series from coast to coast. I regularly co-curated the Alternate VisionsAvant-Garde Film/Video series and Documentary Voices at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive from 2006-2023. See Curatorial section for list of programs 

 Northwestern University, Evanston, IL Cinema Studies. Ph.D. 2001.

The San Francisco Art Institute, S. F., CA, M.F.A. in Filmmaking, 1983.

St. Martin's College of Art, London, England, Certificate, 1979.

My technical skills include proficiency in all aspects of 16mm film production as well as digital filmmaking. See CV for details.