Textured floral landscape with dried blooms beneath a winding pale river cutting through dark blue hills.

Experimental Tuesdays

Offering free public screenings of the most recent and celebrated experimental work in 35mm, 16mm and video. A standout venue for a parade of visiting filmmakers and touring programs, this series is hosted in partnership with UWM’s Union Cinema.

Experimental Tuesdays is a free public series featuring celebrated work of contemporary and historical artist-made film and video. This weekly series presents films and artists that explore the creative and critical potential of moving images. It also amplifies marginalized voices by hosting artists that represent diverse populations, such as LGBT, Native American, Black and Latinx artists. Hosted by the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres, and presented in partnership with UWM’s Union Cinema, this series is a bedrock of the Milwaukee arts landscape. Recent screenings include Silvia das Fadas, Courtney Stephens, Simon Liu, Helena Wittman, Jessica Bardsley, Suneil Sanzgiri, Mary Helena Clark, Angelo Madsen, and Rhayne Vermette to name a few.

Upcoming Screenings

Full Events Calendar

2026 Fall Screenings


Person walking beside a roadway at night, wearing a sandwich-board sign with the bold text “SILK TIES”; a parked car is visible nearby.

September 15, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: Being Where

Location, location, location. A neighborhood of experimental shorts, drawn from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive and the world at large, focusing on place. We are where we are, often here, sometimes there, always where. And the cinema too is a there, a where, a place we share to gather paradise and expand our sense of the possible.


Black-and-white image of a person operating a large video camera, illuminated against a dark background in a studio or stage setting.

September 22, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: An Evening with Dick Blau

Join archivist Shiraz Bhathena in conversation with Dick Blau to celebrate a major archiving and remastering project. Blau—a co-founder of the UWM Film Department, longtime professor and fixture of the Milwaukee art community—works across film, photography and video producing a varied body of work that includes psychological portraiture, experimental narrative, devised performance, ethnomusicology and the domestic.


Black-and-white portrait of a seated person wearing a patterned vest against a backdrop of curtains and pinned papers.

September 29, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: TCB with Louis Messiah

TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing is a biography of the influential writer, filmmaker and cultural worker, who with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. The film is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara's life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Join us in-person for a dialogue with the Producer/Director, Louis Messiah and Marquise Mays.


Abstract blue organic pattern resembling interconnected fibers or rippling water, framed by filmstrip perforations on both sides.

October 6, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: Films by Julie Murray

Drawing upon a background in painting and the Fine Arts, Julie Murray has made over 25 beguiling and beautiful moving image works, equally invested in metaphysics as they are in material. Murray will be present to share a program of her recent short work on 16mm and digital.


Riders on horseback travel across a snowy hillside in a black-and-white landscape, viewed from behind along a winding trail.

October 13, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: The Films of Karthik Pandian

Karthik Pandian’s work in film, installation and intervention renders mythologies of the present through forgotten, fragmentary and futuristic pasts, unsettling the ground of history.


A black and white still frame image in art deco style with the word FOCUS at the center.

October 20, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: From the Archives (curated by Mary Wheeler)

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.


Floral installation with dried flowers in the foreground and a textured blue landscape backdrop featuring a winding river under a night-sky-like scene.

October 27, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: The Works of Alisi Telengut

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian roots living between Berlin and Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. She creates frame-by-frame, under-the-camera animations using mixed media, including oil pastel, sand, stones, crystals, and found materials. Through handmade and painterly processes, her work explores human-nature relationships, animistic worldviews, and Indigenous knowledge systems of Mongolian peoples.


Experimental Tuesdays: From the Archives Promo Image

November 17, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: From the Archives (curated by Alessandro Streccioni)

Curated by MFA candidates from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, these programs feature a unique opportunity to see some of the incredible 16mm prints from the UWM Cinema Arts Archive. For each program, the curator is invited to program a selection of films around a theme of their choosing.


Black-and-white portrait of a person seated with hands under their chin, framed like a film negative against a simple studio backdrop.

December 1 & 2, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: The World and Works of Portia Cobb

Join us for two nights of works celebrating the radical work of the legendary Portia Cobb. Her interdisciplinary practice as an artist and filmmaker is deeply interested in telling stories that reflect the double-consciousness of African American history, identity, memory & forced forgetting. This creative body of work and research has joined these themes and found form in videos, photographic essays, field recordings, ephemeral installations and site-specific performances.


Illustrated hand in a ruffled sleeve held before a bright, face-shaped silhouette, rendered in white line work on a dark blue background.

December 8, 7:00 pm

Experimental Tuesdays: Expand/Contract – Performances for the Cinema

An evening of expanded / contracted / living / breathing / doing / being (in the) cinema, performances for the room and for one night only by invited and commissioned artists, including Ruby Que, Camille Casemir and Liyan Zhao.