Gina Basso
Film Curator | Program Manager | Public Media Worker
About: 15 years experience in arts program management, film curation and performance production for museums, theaters, and galleries. I focus on collaboration, community outreach + engagement, and strengthening strategic partnerships to create impactful programming experiences.
I have curated film programs for: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (SF, CA), San Francisco Cinematheque, Roxie Theater (SF, CA), Castro Theater (SF, CA), Alamo DraftHouse (SF, CA), California College of the Arts and Northwest Film Forum (Seattle, WA), Design Within Reach (SF, CA) and Hunter’s Point Shipyard, (SF, CA).
Day job. Public Media Worker at American Documentary | POV.
RECENT PRESS
KQED interview, “Experimental Animations Relocate from YBCA to Shapeshifters Cinema”, Sarah Hotchkiss, March 20, 2024
KQED, “Why I’m Declaring 2024 the Year of Film”, Sarah Hotchkiss, February 5, 2024
SF Chronicle profile, “After SFMOMA cut film programs, former leader found her footing without leaving the city”, Pam Grady, December 6 2022
Creative practice: I use video to explore transitional or altered states of being. I combine found and original footage to harness the energy of poetic montage and draw on a rich tradition of experimentation with various forms, materials, and processes including handmade animation and sound collage.
My work has screened at: San Francisco’s Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival, Artist Television Access, Roxie Theater, HAXAN Film Festival, Antimatter Experimental Film Festival, and online via publicrecords.nyc.
Samples of my videos + trailers can be viewed HERE
Linked In profile
RECENT SCREENINGS
BAY AREA NOW 9 - Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
BAN9 exhibition, member of the curatorial counsel.
Curated film screenings and programs:
Canyon Cinema: Contemporary Bay Area Film, organized in partnership with Canyon Cinema. October 14, 2023.
San Francisco Cinematheque: Contemporary Views from the Bay Area, organized in partnership with SF Cinematheque. October 23, 2023.
Canyon Cinema Across Time and Space, looping film program. November 1 - 30, 2023.
Prismatic Permutations: Expanded Cinema Performances, looping film program. December 1 - 30, 2023.
fragments: films by Emily Chao. January 1 - 31, 2024.
California Newsreel - Forward to the 6th Decade, organized in partnership with California Newsreel. January 13, 2024.
Color in Twelve Parts by Leah Rosenberg, looping film program. February 1 - 29, 2024. Commissioned by Gina Basso in association with YBCA.
These programs were scheduled but were canceled or moved to other locations due to the ongoing controversies at YBCA:
from within a great silence, tamara suarez porras. February 17, 2024. NEW LOCATION TBA!!!
Untitled: Sound & Images, co-organized with Artists’ Television Access. NEW LOCATION: The Lab, SF. April 12, 2024
This Room is Nothing Without You: Experimental Animation & Expanded Performance. Featuring Jeremy Rourke, Meghana Bisineer, Lydia Greer and Kathleen Quillian. Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, CA. March 23, 2023.
Updates on the ongoing issues YBCA:
Image: The Pendulum (Linda Scobie, 3 min, 2021, 16mm, color, sound)
THIS EVENT HAS PASSED
ARTICULATE EMOTION: DOCUMENTARIES BY CHRISTINE CHOY
December 10 - 11, 2022
Presented at Roxie Theater,SF, CA
Read some press about the show!
“You cannot structure film with logic. Film is emotion. Emotion is universal. When you are able to articulate emotion, it is so universal…How you grab this universal feeling with any subject, and you can share it with different people and nationalities, that is what I am trying to communicate with my films. Once you are able to catch emotion in a film, the logic comes through.” – Christine Choy.
Christine Choy, a maverick of Asian American independent filmmaking, has spent her career producing and directing social justice documentaries that probe the seams in the American fabric to explore complex histories of race, gender, class and economic forces. Since 1972, Choy has directed, co-directed and produced over 70 documentaries chronicling resistance movements, social activists, racial disparity and lived experiences of immigrants. Articulate Emotion offers but a brief foray into the documentary world of Christine Choy and includes several of her most revered works, including a recently restored version of the Oscar nominated film Who Killed Vincent Chin? The legacy of her documentary practice has inspired a new generation of filmmakers, including many who have studied with her at NYU and embraced her work and activist approach. This series celebrates her contribution to documentary filmmaking and coincides with the special presentation of The Exiles, starring Christine Choy!
A program curated by Gina Basso. Coordination assistance by Rick Norris, senior programmer at Roxie Theater.
THIS EVENT HAS PASSED
CROSSROADS 2022
August 26 – 28, 2022
Festival Trailer produced by Gina Basso, view here.
San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual film festival. CROSSROADS 2022 featured 10 curated programs.
67 works of film, video and performance by 71 artists representing 18 countries and territories.
Presented at GRAY AREA, SF, CA.
Previous exhibition:
seen only, heard only through someone else’s description
Guest curator at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.
January 14 – Apr 30, 2022
seen only, heard only through someone else’s description engages filmmakers and artists whose interdisciplinary practices draw from performance, film, photography, research, and writing. The program’s title stems from Audience Distant Relative (1977) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)—a poem, performance, and mail art piece that uses language to unravel dynamics of distance, visibility, hearing, and communication.
Press:
Variable West staff pick!
SF Chronicle by Tony Bravo
Squarecylinder by Jaimie Baron
The program is organized in two sections of experimental short films by women and nonbinary artists from the 1970s through the 2010s. Session One – Sometimes We Stand Alone explores personal identity and history through experimental processes and found footage. Session Two – Drawing Energy is concerned with communities of women and their collective power to document and deeply engage with artistic, cultural, or familial lineages. The collected works interweave varied perspectives to probe formal tensions between the moving image and still photography. Featured filmmakers include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Brenda Contreras, sair goetz, Onyeka Igwe, Lily Jue Sheng, Lucy Kerr, Deborah Stratman, Tina Takemoto, and Paige Taul, among others.
Presented in conjunction with Image Gardeners, an exhibition of modern and contemporary photography from the McEvoy Family Collection. The exhibition identifies an emergent vision of womanhood through photographic representation. Sessions One and Two screen sequentially, for eight weeks each, throughout the run of the exhibition.
NY Times post about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from their belated obituary series, Overlooked No More.
image credit: sair goetz, me and my army (still), 2018, 11 min., color, sound.
“I could sit in this dark room for hours.” - Variable West, from their newsletter Northern California picks from Theodora Walsh.
The ultimate compliment!
“Film is a battleground!” - Sam Fuller
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