Betzy Bromberg, former Director of the Program in Film and Video, has been making experimental films since 1976. Her most recent film, Glide of Transparency (2016/17), completes her 16mm abstract feature trilogy. It premiered at the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles and was listed as one of the year’s best films in both Senses of Cinema (Jordan Cronk) and Fandor(Michael Sicinski and Jordan Cronk) https://www.fandor.com/posts/interesting-times-year-avant-garde-film. Her previous film, Voluptuous Sleep (2011), had its festival premiere at the New York Film Festival: Views From The Avant-Garde. Voluptuous Sleep was listed as one of the Best Films for 2011 in both the New York Times (Manohla Dargis) and Indiewire (Andrea Picard). Scott MacDonald included it in his Highlights 2012 in Lumiere Magazine and published an interview with Ms. Bromberg in his book, Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema.
In June, 2018, Ms. Bromberg had a comprehensive retrospective of her films at the historic Anthology Film Archives in NYC which included the NY premiere of Glide of Transparency. Her previous film, Voluptuous Sleep won the Stan Brakhage award at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2012). In 2011, both Voluptuous Sleep and a Darkness Swallowed (2005) screened at the Guggenheim Bilbao (Spain). In addition, Voluptuous Sleep screened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI 2012), the Bradford International Film Festival (United Kingdom) and CinemaSpace at the Segal Centre of Performing Arts (Montreal) as part of Suoni per iI Popolo Avant-Garde Music Festival.
Ms. Bromberg had a full retrospective of her films at BAFICI in 2007. a Darkness Swallowed (2005), screened at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Seoul Film Festival (South Korea), the Athens International Film Festival (Greece), the Bradford International Film Festival (England), Seattle International Film Festival (Washington), The Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (Spain) and at Ponrepo, theatre of the Czech National Film Archives (Prague, Czech Republic). Ms. Bromberg’s films have shown extensively in museums, cultural venues and festivals within the United States and abroad. Most notably, her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinemateque, the Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (France).
Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video California Institute of the Arts, Ms. Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.