Kevin Lee

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media, which have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as websites such as Mubi and Hyperallergic. In 2022 he will be the first Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound. In 2016 the Austrian Filmmuseum programmed a retrospective of his video essays. His short Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox received the most mentions in the 2020 Sight & Sound video essay poll. Through Bottled Songs, his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. He was 2017 Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced Learning Farocki, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he co-curated the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris. He was Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at
 Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Texte zur Kunst, Slate and Indiewire. He is Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, where he is co-director of the Masters Program in Artistic Research.