Brakhage Symposium 2026
Saturday, February 21, 2026
ATLAS 100
12:00-2:00 PM — Stephanie Barber
2:15-4:15 PM — ASM Kobayashi
4:30-6:30 PM— Deborah Stratman
Sunday, February 22, 2026
ATLAS 100
12:00-2:00 PM— Group program and conversation
2:15-4:15PM — 1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday
4:30-5:30PM — Celebrating Stan
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21ST
Stephanie Barber
12:00-2:00 PM
ATLAS 100
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor. Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema. Barber is Department Head of Film and Digital Cinema at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pa.
ASM Kobayashi
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 100
A.S.M. Kobayashi is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through videos, performances, installations and illustrations. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick and received nominations from the Drama Desk and United Solo award. Kobayashi’s videos have been exhibited internationally at museums and festivals. She is a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow, and was a guest artist at the Flaherty Seminar. She is currently based in Toronto and NYC producing special projects at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.
Deborah Stratman
4:30-6:30 PM
ATLAS 100
Deborah Stratman makes work about power, experience, history and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society intertwine. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and linearity to be a trap. Her forty+ films and multiple artworks have been exhibited and awarded internationally and have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, levitation, musical insects, raptors, comets, street drag racing, tightrope walking, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the Թ of Illinois.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22ND
1990s Experimental Film in Japan:
Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday
Sunday, Feb. 22nd
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 100
The Life of Ants (Ari no seikatsu) / Yūko Asano, Japan, 1994, 14 min
Benighted but Not Begun (Yukikuredo machiakazu) / Yukie Saitō, Japan, 1994, 22 min
The Place Which Isn’t Necessarily Wrong (Anagachi machigatteru tomo ienai kū) / Hiromi Saiki, Japan, 1996, 18 min
Night Park/White Roses (Yoruno kōen / shiroi bara) / Mari Terashima, Japan, 1997, 11 min
A Dandelion, Rosaceae (Bara-ka tanpopo) / Utako Koguchi, Japan, 1990, 8 min
Curated by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas
Wakae Nakane is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include documentary film and video, experimental cinema, postwar Japanese history and cinematic culture, and feminist theory and historiography. Her dissertation project centered on the essayistic mode of expression in Japanese documentary and experimental film practices since the 1970s. She has published in both English and Japanese, including “Politicizing Familial Space: Women’s Post-Fukushima Documentaries as the Creation of Counterpublics” in Women and Global Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2025); “Constructing an Intimate Sphere Through Her Own Female Body: Naomi Kawase’s Documentary Films” in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Edinburgh Թ Press, 2018); and “Female Performers as Authors: Documentary Film Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 and the Women’s Liberation Movement” in JunCture (Japanese, 2016).
Miryam Sas (Ph.D, Yale) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at the Թ of California, Berkeley. She is the author of She is the author of Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art (Duke Թ Press, 2022), Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard Թ Press, 2010) and Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford UP, released in 2001). She has written numerous articles in English, French, and Japanese on subjects such as Japanese futurism, intermedia art, experimental animation, pink film, cross-cultural performance, and butoh dance. She is currently working on a book on media theory and contemporary art in Japan, Media Acts: Infrastructure, Potentiality, and the Afterlife of Art in Japan.
CelebratingStan
Sunday, Feb. 22nd
4:30-5:30 PM
ATLAS 100
A program of Stan Brakhage films on 16mm, curated by Suranjan Ganguly. His Celebrating Stanseries honors Brakhage’s extraordinary creativity—nearly 400 films—and his profound influence on the history of cinema.
Suranjan Ganguly created the Stan Brakhage Film Series--Celebrating Stan--in 2003 in memory of his close friend, colleague, and mentor. Heserved as the director of the Brakhage Center from 2015-2020 and has beenactively involved in presenting the filmmaker’s work in the US andabroad. He was invited to curate the three-part Unknown Brakhageshow at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 2010 and again in 2018 to present Brakhage’s work. He has also spoken on Brakhage and curated shows at major venues in London, Rome, Lisbon, Berlin, Dublin, Vienna, and Mexico City. He is a Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the Թ of Colorado Boulder.
