Amie Dowling creates dance and theater for the stage, for film and in community settings. For the past 17 years, her work has considered the politics and representation of mass incarceration. Well Contested Sites, a collaboration Austin Forbord and Bay Area artists, some of who were previously incarcerated, won the 2013 International Screendance film prize. Her work has been presented internationally at such venues as Busboys & Poets (Washington D.C.), Lincoln Center (NYC), Regards Hybrides (Canada), Cinéma Jean-Eustache (France), Passangen Art Gallery (Sweden), and the Juming Museum (Taiwan). Amie is an artist in residence in the San Francisco Jails and San Quentin Prison where she is a member of the Artistic Ensemble, http://www.aesq.info/. She is an Associate Professor in the Performing Arts Department at the University of San Francisco.
Austin Forbord is a video artist, filmmaker, and choreographer. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work in each of these fields including an Emmy nomination and a Documentary of the Year award from the California Film Awards in 2013 for the documentary film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco; an Isadora Duncun Award nomination for performance in 2001, visual design in 2003 and the award in 2006 for his design contribution to Deborah Slater’s House of Memoires; and the Jury prize at ADF’s 2013 International Screen Dance Festival for his short dance film Well Contested Sites. Austin has performed with a diverse group of San Francisco based companies including his own companies Rapt and AWD, as well as Scott Wells & Dancers, On-Site Dance Co, Kunst-Stoff and Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband. He has created media designs for performances by Opera Parallele, Asolo Rep, Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Moses’ Kin, Sara Shelton Mann /Contraband, Stephen Pelton, Erling Wold, Liss Fain Dance, Kunst-Stoff and Motion-Lab. San Francisco Classical Voice described his video design for three of Opera Parallele’s shows as “some of the best I’ve seen anywhere for opera.” He is responsible for the critically acclaimed full-length documentary film, Artists in Exile: A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco which was the Documentary of the Year at ADF’s 2000 International Screen Dance Festival. His film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco commissioned by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation was featured at the 2011 Mill Valley Film Festival among many others and had its broadcast premiere on PBS.
Experimental Film & Music Video Festival 