Join the conversation with Alan Berliner in TALK Share your thoughts with one of America’s most interesting independent filmmakers…
	13 Ways of Looking at Sound Alan Berliner’s Flash-animated manifesto…(Requires the FREE Macromedia Flash Plugin)
	Audiofile Ben Shapiro’s video portrait of Alan and his large filing cabinet filled with sound. (Requires Apple Quicktime.)

( Note: “13 Ways of Looking at Sound” was created with help from Transom Editor Viki Merrick and Transom alumni and Flashmeister Jason Rayles, with support from the Open Studio Project)

Alan Berliner’s uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose and popular appeal into compelling film essays has made him one of America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers. The New York Times has described Berliner’s work as “powerful, compelling and bittersweet… full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures… Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life.”

Berliner’s award-winning experimental documentary films, THE SWEETEST SOUND (2001), NOBODY’S BUSINESS (1996), INTIMATE STRANGER (1991), and THE FAMILY ALBUM (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and have received awards and prizes at many major international film festivals. Retrospectives of his films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at film festivals from Norway, Finland and England to Spain, Argentina and Brazil. His films are in the permanent collections of many film societies, festivals, libraries, colleges and museums.

A recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, Berliner has received multiple grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA and in 1998, won his third career Emmy Award (he has also received six nominations) from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He was also the recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association in 1993, and was honored with a “Storyteller Award” from the 2001 Taos Talking Picture Film Festival. He received a “Cultural Achievement Award in the Arts” from the National Foundation For Jewish Culture in 2002.

In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of photographic, audio and video installation works. In 2002, he was an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he premiered an interactive multi-media installation, THE LANGUAGE OF NAMES. His interactive video installation, GATHERING STONES, was commissioned for the exhibition, To The Rescue, Eight Artists in an Archive, which premiered at the International Center of Photography in New York City in February, 1999, and traveled to Miami, Houston and San Francisco. It was re-commissioned for the Holocaust Museum, Houston in 2002.

Berliner was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens and lives in Manhattan. He is currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he teaches a course entitled, “Experiments in Time, Light and Motion.”

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Alan Berliner Links

Alan Berliner’s Website:
www.alanberliner.com