Leslie Thornton has been at the very forefront of experimental film and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film and video works and installations. An acknowledged pioneer in media, Thornton's early film and video work first addressed the interplay between cinema, video, installation and improvisation in a manner that prefigured many contemporary media strategies. Her major projects include Peggy and Fred in Hell (a 26 year, multi-episodic work), Adynata (an early film dealing with Orientalism), Another Worldly (a found footage "musical" and critique), Let Me Count The Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7... (a serial, modular video, addressing the exfoliations of war), and The Binocular Series (an ongoing installation project based upon imagery of animals).

Thornton's work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, MoMA PS1, and featured at numerous international film festivals, including the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam and Berlins Film Festivals, among several others. Thornton has also received numerous awards and accolades, including the Maya Deren Lifetime Achievement Award, three Rockefeller Fellowships, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for Media, and she has been nominated for the Hugo Boss Award. As a teacher at Brown University, Thornton has been instrumental in building one of the most progressive media arts programs in the United States, and has influenced a whole generation of younger artists. She has had retrospectives at MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Jeu de paume and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain, among others.



March 27, 12:30
Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston