Rian Brown-Orso is an award winning independent filmmaker, visual artist, and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. Brown-Orso’s work spans a variety of film genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, and video installation. In 2015, she was awarded grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation’s Just Films initiative for the production of The Foreigner’s Home a full-length documentary film on Toni Morrison at the Louvre, which was released in 2017. Her works which have screened internationally at film festivals and museums including Rotterdam International Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, British Film Institute, BAM, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, L.A Hammer, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Harvard Film Archive, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Anchorage Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Santa Fe International Film Festival, Miami Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Women in the Director’s Chair and others. Reflecting Brown-Orso’s background in visual arts and cinematography her films employ visually dynamic imagery, hand-painted animation, and experimental techniques. She co-directed Blue Desert ~ Towards Antarctica, a multichannel video installation shot during an expedition to Antarctica with National Geographic. Brown-Orso was Associate Producer for feature documentary, Raise the Roof, a heroic story about rebuilding a Polish synagogue, which appeared on PBS in 2017 and won Best Documentary in the Seattle Jewish Film Festival and screened in over sixty film festivals worldwide. In 2009, she co-founded and co-directs the Apollo Outreach Initiative, a media education program that works with urban youth in the Northeast Ohio. She has received numerous awards including three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence awards and was an artist in resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She grew up in Boston, studied visual art at Massachusetts College of Art and received her Masters of Fine Arts in film from the University of California, San Diego. Her work focuses on women’s issues, social justice and experimenting with new forms of animation and time-based art. She lives with her husband and two sons between Cleveland, Ohio and Turin, Italy.
