Glasstire Interview with Aurora's Visiting Artists

Aurora founder Andrea Grover interviews artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy for Glasstire in anticipation of Aurora's screening tomorrow night entitled Co-Existing and Co-llaborating. Read the full article here and come to the show!

David Waddell's Recent Salon at Aurora

For those of you who did not make the Menil Community Art Festival, Aurora hosted a salon with local artist, David Waddell on stop motion animation. Waddell is also one of the instructors for Aurora's Summer Boot Camp. Click here for a quick clip from the salon.

Reports from the SXSW front

The Aurora gals are fresh from their pilgrimage to Austin and the SXSW Film Festival with news and new friends to report on. Great to meet and see in Austin were fellow jurors (for the Time Warner Cable and Ovation TV Young Filmmaker Award) Bart Weiss (who has screened his Dallas VideoFest at Aurora numerous times), Marcy Garriot (accomplished documentary filmmaker behind the film Inside the Circle), our favorite East Coast organizational crush, Rootop Films, and our favorite West Coast friends, Wholphin, not to mention several of our Houston neighbors including artist Kelly Sears, Microcinema International, SWAMP, and Houston Film Commission, and the filmmakers behind the Anderson Fair documentary For the Sake of the Song. A highlight of the trip was Aurora founder Andrea Grover's panel on Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web, and though we missed these, we wish we had been able to see Matt McCormick's (who appeared at Aurora with the You Are Here seminar curated by Bree Edwards) film Some Days Are Better Than Others, and our Texas Filmmaker Production Fund Workshop Host Bryan Poyser's (of Austin Film Society) new film Lovers of Hate. If any of our readers are Austin-bound, you still have opportunities to catch some of these films in their final screenings. See the full schedule here.

Aurora at Fotofest

If you didn't know already, Aurora's talented curator, Mary Magsamen, is a well known artist in her own right. Her and her husband, Stephan Hillerbrand, form the video art duo Hillerbrand and Magsamen and have a nation-wide exhibition history including exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia and being accepted into the Ann Arbor Film Festival multiple times. They are currently presenting four new videos in the Houston FotoFest exhibition titled, "4 Place Setting." The show runs from March 12-April 10 and the opening reception is April 1st from 6-8pm at the Spacetaker Gallery, 2101 Winter Street.

Magsamen is doing double duty for Fotofest as she has also curated the Aurora Fotofest Screening entitled "Co-Existing and Co-llaborating," featuring six collaborative teams of media artists including Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Darrin Martin and Jamil Hellu, Potter Belmar Labs, Duke and Battersby, Voshart and Humphries and Dana and Travis Hanmer. More on these artists and this event here

Hope you'll join both Mary and Aurora on the Fotofest tour and stop by both events if you can!