Fred Worden
Associate Professor, Emeritus
Cinematic Arts
frederwo@umbc.edu
Fred Worden has been making experimental film since the mid 1970s. His films have been shown in the Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, The Centre Pompidou, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, The Hong Kong International Film Festival, and numerous other experimental film venues. His writings have appeared in Cinematograph and Criss-Cross Art Communications. His films are in the Stan Brakhage Collection and the collection of the Centre Pompidou among others. He has completed over 25 experimental films, including The Or Cloud, which was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His films, Amongst the Persuaded and Here won Juror’s Choice First Prizes in the 2005 and 2006 Black Maria Film and Video Festivals.
Worden’s films develop out of his interest in visual perception and the special address cinema makes to both the nervous system and the pre-conscious brain. His work over the course of the last 30 years has investigated how a flow of individual frames passing through the mechanism of the projector gives rise to the so-called illusion of motion, and how that process might be harnessed to purposes other than realism or representation. For Worden, cinema is first and foremost a visual art and his films draw on music and abstract painting as primary sources.
Professor Worden received an M.F.A. in filmmaking from the California Institute of the Arts.