Conventionally hierarchical production practices offer a limited but culturally outsized sense of how we can make films together. This program glimpses generously at other approaches to collaborative filmmaking, pondering how the processes of production inform final forms. These ranging relational modes tease at the poetics, politics and possibilities group work magnetize and manifest.
Geo Rutherford is a Wisconsin-based artist known for her work on the Great Lakes. Her “Spooky Lakes” TikTok series, launched in 2020, gained viral popularity. With over 1.8 million followers, she’s praised by educators and parents for inspiring kids to explore science, history, and the environment.
For the first time, Chamber Music Milwaukee is inviting UWM Music Department Alumni to perform an evening of chamber music. An opening concert not to be missed!
Peck School of the Arts will host an exhibition of Informational portraits of famous Performing Artists who are public about how they create Art while having an Invisible Disability. We will also be giving away buttons for people with Invisible Disabilities or people who support others. Plus information tables from Arts Organizations and our Campus Resource Centre. Come visit us in the PSOA Theatre Lobby.
Dani and Sheilah Restack have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Dani’ video work or Wilson’s multimedia performance and installation work could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts. – Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2017.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator who’s practice fuses personal narratives with historical research to address broader structural inequalities based on gender and class. Ballard teaches at UWM and is a recipient of the 2025 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists.
The art of cinematic language isn't only reserved for big screen features and shorts. In recent years, serial programming has been finding its way back to the hearts of media lovers. There is a specific type of depth, nuance and audacity that can exist on the television screen that differs from theatrical releases. This creative difference has allowed many film directors to dip their toe into the episodic landscape, flexing their style, voice and commitment to a collective understanding of a serialized show. With this rising interest in television, we are hosting an artist talk with an Emerging Film Director, who has made her mark into the episodic landscape and proved that there is a best of both worlds.
Join us for an evening of jazz featuring the UWM Jazz Ensemble, the UWM Afro-Caribbean Jazz Orchestra and the UWM Youth Jazz Ensemble (UJAY).
Adebukola Bodunrin is a Nigerian-Canadian film, & video artist who explores language, culture, and media. In her collage animations, she manipulates film using unorthodox manual and digital techniques to produce unexpected cinematic experiences. Bodunrin’s animation work has been featured on the television series Transparent, and in KCET’s “Lost LA” series, for which she also won an LA Area Emmy award for segment direction.
Ceci Tejeda’s family roots are from Michoacán, Mexico, which is why she has Purepecha blood in her veins. Ever since she was a young girl, she’s admired her culture. She creates Alebrijes made of “cartoneria,” a unique and traditional papier-mâché technique from Mexico City. Tejeda also creates large-sized pieces that support various social justice movements and activism using the same method.
Ken Jacobs, one of the true radicals of American cinema and a lion of experimental film, passed October 5th, a mere season since his beloved wife and collaborator Flo preceded him. They lived long, full, beautiful lives. In addition to his inimitable work in film, video, painting, performance and all range of moving images, Ken started and was at the center of the film program at SUNY-Binghamton and co-founded The Millennium Film Workshop.
In a world silenced by a ban on music, a group of daring teens risks everything to rediscover it. They meet in secret to learn about all things musical, defying an oppressive government determined to keep them silent. But their newfound knowledge comes at a price. In Darkness, Audio Flowers Bloom is a bold, imaginative new work exploring resistance, identity and the unshakable human need for expression. Presented as part of the UWM Department of Theatre’s New Dramaworks series, this thrilling world premiere amplifies voices that refuse to be silenced.
Dan Grzeca is a Chicago-based artist and printmaker known for thousands of illustrations, hand-silkscreened prints and posters for bands like The Black Keys, Iron and Wine, Built to Spill, Ween and The Decemberists. His studio and shop is called Ground Up Press.
Worlds Within: Midwestern Microcultures is a photography exhibition curated by Peck School of the Arts Advanced Photography Students currently enrolled in ART 452: Contemporary Issues in Photography.
Join us to celebrate our students’ performances, featuring a diverse program of solo and chamber music works for the guitar!
In her debut feature, photographer and filmmaker Celeste Rojas Mugica confronts the political weight of images, revisiting her father’s photographic archive developed in exile in Latin America following activist involvement during the Pinochet dictatorship. 51 years later, this gentle, complex and visually resourceful account of densely traumatic history conjures an intimate family portrait from the dark room – opening spaces for reflection and resistance.
The Composition and Technology program will present a concert of original works by UWM students. The program will include freshly composed pieces for acoustic and electronic mediums.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator, and Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in major museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and Walker Art Center. She co-runs The Suburban (Milwaukee) and The Poor Farm (Little Wolf, WI), and is a 2025 Mary L. Nohl Fellow.
The heart and soul of many film productions lie within the Art & Production Design departments. From set design, to costuming to props, these departments allow for other worlds to be introduced, sustained and transported in any film. As a key component within the pre-production process it is essential that young filmmakers know how to approach art in their films. Join us at SPECIAL FEATURES to learn more about props & wardrobe budgets, sourcing & shopping, and process / mood boards. Local filmmakers and artists, Kara Mulrooney & Amanda Tollefson, will lead us in a workshop offering their expertise and backgrounds working on films with high concept art, commercial products and indie film work. If you interested in art and production design departments, this Special Features is for you!
Chamber Music Milwaukee presents a powerful program exploring music created in times of war, including works connected to the Holocaust and the resilience of the human spirit. The concert features faculty artists Todd Levy (clarinet), Bernard Zinck (violin), Elena Abend (piano), and Jamie Hofman (violin), joined by guest artist Adrien Zitoun (cello) from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.