Events

Paris Is Burning

Introduced by Solveig Nelson

Paris Is Burning

When:
Thursday, March 31, 2016, 7:00pm - 7:00pm
Description:

Jennie Livingston's exhilarating celebration of self-invention is an intimate tour of Harlem drag balls, where gay and transgender black and Latino participants in family-like houses compete for prizes in categories like voguing and “butch queen realness.” Winner of a Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Paris Is Burning is a funny, sad, and thoughtful window into a community of New Yorkers who look to the catwalk for refuge from the poverty, racism, and homophobia they endure in their everyday lives.

Digitally remastered from the original 16mm elements courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute and the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project.

(Jennie Livingston, USA, 1990, 71 min., DCP)

Solveig Nelson is an art critic and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago. She has designed and taught courses on video art and queer cinema, contributed to Artforum, and co-organized the 2015 symposium "Moving Images in Art." She has conducted interviews for the Video Data Bank’s Artists on Artists series, and published interviews with Sadie Benning, with whom she also collaborated on the video installation, Play Pause (2006). Nelson holds a 2015 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a 2016 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chester Dale Art History Fellowship.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.