Michelle Trujillo
Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media
Michelle Trujillo was born in Miami to Colombian and Costa Rican parents and grew up in South Florida. She received her B.A. in multimedia studies from Florida Atlantic University and her M.F.A. in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latin American culture, gender, and identity creation.
Trujillo works in Spanish, English, and Spanglish as a mirroring of her lived experience. She also works in various mediums such as eco and hand-processed 16mm film, digital video, 35mm still film, and cyanotypes.
Her films have been exhibited in festivals, galleries, and conferences nationally and internationally such as the Alchemy Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival, and Mimesis Documentary Festival. Trujillo has won multiple awards such as the Lightpress Grant and the LEF Moving Image Grant.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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This hands-on editing class introduces both traditional and experimental editing techniques on Adobe's Premiere Pro editing software. Through individual projects, screenings, in-class demonstrations and short editing assignments, students will study the art and aesthetics of editing in experimental, documentary and narrative genres while developing a vocabulary to discuss both the function and art of the cut. The class covers elements of storytelling, pace, emotion, action, continuity, and time manipulation. While most of the class will utilize Adobe Premiere Pro, we will use Davinci Resolve when learning about color correction and grading. This class is meant to accommodate beginning to intermediate level editors. Keywords:Editing, Film, Video, Premiere, Resolve
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The focus of this course is on experimenting with sustainable methods of bringing 16mm analog filmmaking into the future! It is designed as an immersive hands-on workshop. Students' experiments throughout the semester in analog sound and image will culminate in a single individual project to be screened and/or performed at the end of the semester. These experiments will be accompanied by several readings by film artists and screenings of films that utilize analog media as a conceptual tool for class discussion. The techniques covered in this course are shooting with color film, in-camera 16mm special effects, various approaches to black and white hand processing, cameraless imagemaking, destructive film techniques and darkroom special effects. A main focus in this class will be working with eco-developers and experimenting with eco-tints. Students will actively experiment with the instructor in an effort to find/formulate the most effective recipes. Students will work in collaboration with the Hampshire Farm, harvesting and planting indigo, marigold, rosemary, onion and hibiscus. We will spend a large amount of class time shooting film and working in the lab. Students will be expected to take the initiative in scheduling time in the lab for conducting tests and processing outside of class time. Keywords:Sustainability, Analog, 16mm, Film, Eco-Developers
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Our dreams are a place where the impossible can happen, opposites can collide and both reality and time can be subverted. In this class, students will keep an active dream journal which will serve as a source of creative inspiration for the development of different forms of time-based work. Our course content will include technical demos, readings, discussions, screenings and critiques as we also study the historical and contemporary impact that dreams have made on makers of time-based work. This course will provide students with an introduction to working with video in Adobe Premiere Pro. We will cover moving image basics in exposure, composition, sound and digital editing. Students will complete both individual and group assignments throughout the semester such as video and sound work, collage and a dream journal Keywords:Dreams,Video,Film,Collage,Introduction
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Film 1 is a hands-on introduction to 16mm filmmaking with an emphasis on experimental and exploratory film techniques. Through a series of class exercises and individual assignments, students explore 16mm non-synchronous production, basic lighting, analog film editing techniques and early film history. The emphasis of this class is on the student finding a personal means of expression using the film medium Keywords:Film,analogue,Experimental,Bolex
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Personal Cinema is an intermediate course in which students will study and make films/videos/writings in which the maker holds a distinct presence. They will study the history and form of essay film,personal documentary,diary and travelogue.Students will build up and make use of personal archives towards the development of their individual creative voices.They will engage with in-class screenings,discussions,individual projects and technical demos.Students will be polled at the start of the semester around what intermediate technical instruction they are most interested in this semester. Keywords:Personal Cinema,film,video,subjective,archive
