All festival entries were viewed by the AIM II Pre-Screening Committee. The AIM II Jury viewed the selected works and awarded the $1000 Intelefilm Award For Creative Excellence and the $500 USC School of Fine Arts' Student Award. Additionally, we invite visitors to the festival to cast their vote for the AIM II Audience Choice Award.

Tom Leeser is a Visual Effects Supervisor/Art Director with Academy Award winning film production studio Rhythm & Hues, whose credits include the Empire Strikes Back, DragonSlayer, Poltergeist, Mouse Hunt, and Mystery Men. Tom is also an independent artist whose work began with 16mm film, migrated to video and transformed itself into a composite of architecture and digital image installation. His projects have been exhibited at, among others, Videobrasil: Festival Internacional de Arte Eletronica and Siggraph. BIO

Janice Tanaka's intricately textured video collages have pioneered the use of processed images within experimental narrative form. They have been exhibited at, among others, the 1991 and 1993 Whitney Biennal Exhibitions, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Bonn Videonale; and the World Wide Video Festival at the Hague. Janice is also the recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an American Film Institute grant. She currently teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles. BIO

Tran, T. Kim-Trang is an acclaimed curator and video artist. Most recently, her collaborative project with Karl Mihail, Gene Genies Worldwide(c) was featured at the Ars Electronica Festival, Austria. Additionally, Tran's continuing series investigating blindness and its metaphors has been exhibited most recently at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 46th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Most recently Tran's Tran is also an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at Scripps College. BIO

Allan deSouza is an artist and writer whose photographs and installations have been exhibited internationally at, among others, The Photographers Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum, NY and the Third Havana Biennale, Cuba. Allan is Contributing Editor to Fuse Magazine and his fiction and critical writings have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Third Text, London; Tracing Culture, Whitney Museum, NY, and Crossing Black Waters, Working Press, London.

Tomo Isoyama is a Japanese artist whose installations, projections and photographic images have been exhibited extensively in California at venues that include: The Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; the Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro; and The New Wight Gallery, UCLA; CA. Tomo is recent graduate of the USC School of Fine Arts MFA program.

Carole Ann Klonarides Previously Media Arts Curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art and Director of Programs at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Carole Ann is an acclaimed experimental documentary filmmaker and director of public projects utilizing video art.

Tara McPherson's writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, Discourse, and Screen, and in anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace and Basketball Jones. Co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place and Femininity in the Deep South, Tara is also an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies in USC's School of Cinema-TV.

Janet Owen is a British artist whose work in both traditional and new media has been shown most recently at Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica, Brazil; ArtPool, Sweden; Narrative Frictions, Los Angeles; and The Sandberg Institute, Holland. Janet is the co-founder and director of Art In Motion and a member of the USC School of Fine Arts adjunct faculty.

FESTIVAL ADVISOR

Christiane Robbins works at the intersection of the studio practice, digital media and critical theory components of media and visual arts production. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Stedlijck Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Banff Centre for the Arts; and has been exhibited at, among others, the Whitney Museum of Art, NY; the Berlin Film Festival and Women in the Director's Chair. Chris is an Associate Professor with the USC School of Fine Arts.

Of the selected entries, film, video, digital video and animation will be screened at the Annenberg Auditorium on Friday, February 15, while cd-roms, websites, installations, games and performances will be located at the SMMoA for the three days of the festival. All events are FREE to attend and open to the public.

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