My collaboration with the Museum of Vancouver in this course is now exceeding 10 years of consistent work together. Films produced by students in collaboration with curators, artists, and members of the community have been seen in physical exhibitions and online by tens of thousands of museum visitors. Connecting students to the museum in this way has enabled deep engagement with contemporary and historical social and political issues at a deep level, and has created an opportunity for students to learn through community engagement and to support the museum’s work with high quality media to support and contextualize their exhibitions.

In the page below, I highlight major exhibition projects with examples of student work. For each offering of the course, I adjust the syllabus to engage with the core themes of the exhibitions, particular contexts for consent and permissions, while also allowing students to freely choose themes and video subjects that interest and inspire them. In all of our collaborations, reviews of the films at all stages are invited from collaborating curators and the subject-collaborators in the films. Two rounds of full class screenings and critique are undertaken with museum partners before final premieres and sharing.

Of particular note in the way I was able to adapt this class to teach online during the pandemic. My collaboration with Viviane Gosselin was a very positive experience in an extremely difficult time, leading to over 80 films that document the experience of the pandemic, some of which were accessioned into the museum’s permanent covid-19 collection. I therefore also include examples of covid-era online instructional material I created.