skip blumberg video artist

Skip Blumberg, Still Alive and Ticking …. by Victoria Vallis Digital media 350s Blog Skip Blumberg is an Emmy award winning producer, director, journalist and filmmaker for the Manhattan based In Motions Productions. Known as a pioneer in independent documentary video making, he is one of the original video artists of the 1970s. Blumberg's energetic works and distinctive style lends a personal touch to global issues. His television work, experimental videos and documentaries about world culture have appeared on Showtime, PBS, The Learning Channel, National Geographic TV, Disney Channel and The Sci Fi Channel. Educational videos for NYC Outward Bound Center, the Aspiring Principals Program, Girls Inc and The Tibet Center are also well known. Blumberg has interviewed thousands of people for TV shows; including politicians, sports and TV stars, unique individuals, street people, children and senior citizens. The New York State Council on the Arts embraced video as a new art form and funded much of the work of the first generation of portable video gear artists in the 1970s."It's not like we caused a lot of the changes that happened," Blumberg said. Part of the early video collective of 1969, Blumberg was a cofounder of the countercultural Videofreex. This launched the first pirate station Lanesville TV as an artists' low power television in New York State. He was also a central participant in the pioneering television groups TVTV, Ant Farm, Image Union and Paper Tiger TV where he developed his characteristic personal interview style and informal, video techniques. In 1984 Blumberg was selected for Esquire magazine's register of "The Best of the New Generation. Blumberg has also produced and directed several hundred shows and shorts for PBS and cable network television series. Blumberg who lives in Tribeca, is a graduate of the State University of New York. He has been artist-in-residence at WNET/Thirteen, New York, WXXI (Rochester), WCNY (Syracuse) and the 1980 Winter Olympics. He produced and directed many programs for the Alive From Off Center series of KTCA TV, Minneapolis. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow and has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among others. Blumberg's tapes have been broadcast on public and network television, and have been exhibited widely at institutions and festivals including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; Danish Video Festival, Copenhagen; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Museum of Television and Radio, New York; Museum of Broadcasting, Chicago; National Museum of the American Indian, New York; ILJU Art House Archive, Seoul, Korea; and retrospectives at the Rotterdam and Berlin Film festivals. Blumberg has won three Emmys as producer for Sesame Street (more than 150 shorts), Great Performances (700,000-plus online views), The National Geographic Explorer, and MyHero.com. He has also won awards for nonprofits, including the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity and the Twenty-First Century Foundation. Blumberg has been a US State Department cultural envoy in Senegal, Kosovo, Herzegovina, Slovakia, and other countries and a visiting filmmaker, artist-in-residence, and teacher at universities, schools, libraries, and media centers. Blumberg has taught at the University of Hawaii Summer Film and Video Institute, and Ohio Arts Council Summer Media Institute. He is currently is Special Professor in the MFA documentary program at Hofstra University School of Communication. He has also lead hundreds of production workshops, events, performances and in-person screenings in media centers, theaters, galleries, museums, schools, universities, and libraries around the world. Blumberg has been a significant influence to the evolution of the independent video documentary. His early work reflects exploration of graphics in video (JGLNG, 1976) to his recent documentaries about world culture global issues (Weekend in Moscow, 2002 and Return to Tibet, 2003) and performance videos (ConCreep, 2000). He has a distinctive, personal approach to the documentary form that, in his words, "warms up the cool medium of television." His work has been screened widely on television and at museums in permanent collections in the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou Paris and other museums, libraries, schools and universities around the world, as well as for clients’ educational, development and fundraising films. His video: Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show (1981) is considered a classic documentary video and was included in the Museum of Television and Radio's exhibition TV Critics' All-time Favorite Shows. His cultural documentaries and performance videos have been broadcast on PBS, National Geographic TV, Showtime, Bravo, Nickelodeon, among others. Blumberg's works give voice to the individual and the community, as he discovers the idiosyncratic and extraordinary in America's regions and subcultures. His recent independent experimental documentary (Growing Up Bonobo: Photographer Marian Brickner, 2015), and performance videos (On Dream Street..., 2012), show games, sports, music, dance and performance as celebrations of cultural expression. Works such as Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show (1981) and Flying Morning Glory (on fire) (1985) are considered classics. With hundreds of titles on-line, on Showtime, PBS, Disney Channel, National Geographic TV and other TV channels, Blumberg is very well known, with additional retrospectives in the Berlin Film Festival Videofest, Rotterdam Film Festival, and Dallas Video Festival. He is a member and current spokesperson for the production group, Videofreex, the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Dorsky Museum of Art and of the feature documentary film, "Here Come the Videofreex" soon to be released in 2015. Blumberg remains an active digital producer, camcorder reporter, and video pioneer. Several hundred of Blumberg’s movies are online and in distribution for home viewing and for academic and public screenings through Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank, and In Motion Productions, Inc.