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* Karl Nussbaum is an award winning Brooklyn/ Hudson Valley based experimental filmmaker / video installation and performance artist whose work has been internationally exhibited in galleries, museums, universities and film festivals. His film Raw Images from the Optic Cross premiered at the Sundance Festival and Rotterdam International Film Festival and screened at over 150 film festivals worldwide including the London International, Oberhausen Experimental Film Festival, Black Maria FF, KurzFilm Festival Hamburg, Villa De Conde and Hamptons Film Festival (winner Best Short Film); at the American Cinematique, Director’s Guild of America, and on the Sundance Channel and Canal +. He has screened at Lincoln Center, Harvard Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, Smithsonian/ Hirshorn museum, the Carpenter Center, La Mama, PS 122 and at over 350 international film festivals. his films have played at the Richmond Museum of Fine Art, Portland Art Museum, in galleries in NYC, Boston, Berlin, Amsterdam, China, India, and the Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair.
Television screenings include the Sundance Channel, Canal Plus and NHK in Tokyo. He was a featured artist at the Global Freud Symposium at Clark University and at the 12th Annual Holocaust series Symposium at St. Mary’s College.

His installations have been presented in a variety of locations including a private chapel in Italy, a Chateau in Southern France, an empty abandoned factory in Hamburg, and a Gothic castle in Germany, the Hudson Hall Opera House and a barn in Virginia. He has been awarded multiple artist fellowships/ residencies including at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Kriti Artist Residency in India, St. James Cavalier Centre in Malta, Foundacion Ebert in France, M4Gastalier in Amsterdam, the International Kulturbehorde in Hamburg, Germany, Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and the JDZ International Artist Residency in Jingdezhen, China.

His installation, Ghosts in the Cloud Forest premiered at the the Sichuan Fine Art Institute Museum in Chongqing, China in 2021. Recently he has done several large scale projections in China, on buildings in New York and presented his installation, I am a Microscope, at the CR10 Art Space in the Hudson Vally. The film, I am a Microscope recently premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival and played at the Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Melbourne Underground Film Festival among others. He was awarded a Special Mention Jury Award at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venice for Ghost Dance for America, 1890. his film, Phantasmagoria, 1945 premiered at the Oberhausen Experimental film Festival and the Black Maria FF and was recently awarded an ICS Grant by the Interbay Cinema Society.

Nussbaum is a founding member of the 1980's East Village NYC film collective, Film Crash screening over 250 international filmmakers. He has made films for several of Ridge Theater’s productions, including The Manson Family Opera at Lincoln Center.
He has worked as a free lance promo director for MTV, MTV2, VH-1 and the Sundance Channel. When MTV2 was launched in 1996, the first images broadcast were Nussbaum’s short spot, The Grass Suit. He was a Key Grip in NYC for many years, working with well known Cinematographers: Bob Yeoman, Ed Lachman, Ellen Kuras, Maryse Alberti, Richard Quinlan, Bill Pope, Declan Quinn, Larry Clark, and Ernest Dickerson; and with actors/musicians David Bowie, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin, Madonna, Maria Carey, Raquel Welch, Peter Falk and Bob Hope.

Nussbaum has an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute in Berlin.
He has been a Film Professor at Montclair University for over 20 years, guiding over 2000 films through production and is one of the 4 founding members of the Film Department.
His students say he’s the GOAT!

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• Karl Nussbaum