Bill Morrison, still from Light Is Calling, 2004

Bill Morrison

The filmmaker Bill Morrison was in residence at Chinati during January and February of 2011. Morrison is an award-winning artist and filmmaker, with eight titles in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art including Light Is Calling, Decasia, and The Film of Her. His films and videos have been screened in theaters, museums, and concert halls worldwide including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Royal Festival Hall, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, and the Wexner Center. Often working in collaboration with musicians and composers, Morrison has created films to accompany live performances of music by John Adams, Steve Reich, Michael Gordon, and others. His films have been broadcast on PBS, the Sundance Channel, and featured at film festivals such as Sundance, Rotterdam, San Francisco, and Edinburgh. His collaborations with New York’s performance ensemble Ridge Theatre (where he is a founding member) have been recognized with two “Bessie” awards for excellence in theatrical design as well as a Village Voice “Obie” award in 2002. Morrison has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the 2004 NEA Creativity Grant, and Creative Capital. In 2009 he created the film sequences that punctuated Wallace Shawn’s play Grasses of a Thousand Colors, which had its premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre.