Jesse Lerner

Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles.  His short films “Magnavoz” (2006), “T.S.H.” (2004) and "Natives" (1991, with Scott Sterling) and feature-length documentaries The Absent Stone (2013, Sandra Rozental), Atomic Sublime (2010), The American Egypt (2001) Ruins (1999), and Frontierland (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres) have won prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan, and have shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Sydney Biennale and the Sundance, Los Angeles, and Rotterdam Film Festivals.  These films were also featured in mid-career surveys at Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and Washington’s National Gallery.  He has curated film and photography exhibitions for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.  His books include F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alex Juhasz), The Shock of Modernity, The Maya of Modernism, Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, and The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz).  He teaches in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California.