Chris Kennedy (b. 1977 Easton, Maryland; raised Cambridge, Maryland) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer, and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003-2006, for Pleasure Dome from 2000-2006, and for TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths from 2012-2019. He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments from 2009 to 2018. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental, and the Pacific Film Archive. His film Watching the Detectives won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2018. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US, and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was co-founder and host of a weekly film salon. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.
“Often combining a careful concern with the apparatus and a high degree of formal rigour with thoughtful attention to social reality and history, Kennedy’s films examine the interpenetration of a kind of phenomenology – how the things of the world appear to consciousness – with the material possibilities of film (multiple exposures, hand processing, found footage, multi-frame presentations).”—Scott Birdwise, Canadian Film Institute
“[U]nlike so many others who stake out a particular plot of ground and till it for all it’s worth, [Chris Kennedy] is a bit of a conceptual vagabond. A lot of his films are quite different from one another in their surface effects, but at their core they share certain basic questions, in particular the relationship between organized vision and the chaos of the sensory world. That is, how do schemas and patterns determine what we are able to see?”—Michael Sicinski