Bio:

Jeff Silva is an artist, teacher and curator currently living in Boston. Jeff studied Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College and received an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at Emerson College and a Teaching Assistant at VES at Harvard University in documentary and experimental filmmaking and film studies . Prior to teaching he worked professionally as a producer at MIT, creating hundreds of physics and other science and educational videos for the institute.
Jeff is also the co-founder and co-curator of the acclaimed Balagan Experimental Film Series at the Coolidge corner Theatre. Over the past ten years Jeff has developed a diverse body of work from multi-channel installations to short films and experimental documentaries that have screened internationally at festivals and in galleries.
His most recently completed project Balkan Rhapsodies, is a feature length experimental documentary currently screening in film festivals. Shot over the last 8 years in Serbia and Kosovo, Balkan Rhapsodies explores the complexities of the ethnic conflict, nationalism, U.S. involvement, and the post-traumatic aftermath of years of war and oppression in Yugoslavia.


artist bio
His projects, in whatever formal strategy they employ, always tend to challenge boundaries and conventions, whether it be spatial, temporal, cinematic, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, personal or political. His usage of the moving-image in his work is a vehicle for exploring political ambiguity, paradox and corporeality. At the core of his work is the nuanced and studied exploration of complex relationships between subject, artist and spectator. His work strives to create a physical and intellectual dialogue with the viewer bringing them into the final process of meaning-making.
Perhaps best known locally as a film and video curator, in 1999, Jeff co-founded, together with colleague Alla Kovgan, the Balagan Film Series. Over the last seven years they have curated more than 100 programs of the foremost documentaries and alternative films from acclaimed local and international artists at venues such as the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the MFA, the Somerville Theatre, the Revolving Museum, the Independent Film Festival of Boston, The Boston Jewish Film Festival and the Boston Underground Film Festival. He is also a member of the Filmmakers Collaborative.

Filmography/Awards Info:






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