Biography:
Jeff Silva is a filmmaker, Installation artist, professor, and curator living in Somerville, MA since 1997. Jeff has been a recipient of several fellowship grants from the Somerville Arts Council over the years and has also been involved in the art community twice as a film curator for the Somerville Artbeat festival. Jeff studied Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College in NY in the early 90’s and has since gone on to produce, shoot and edit several award winning films, videos and installations that have been presented around the world. His most recent 5-minute video meditation on violence, Ashes, Ashes... was part of the BAC!05 festival of contemporary art in Barcelona, Spain. Jeff also recently collaborated with architect/ artist Ana Miljacki on creating a six-channel installation called Classes, Masses, Crowds for the 2005 “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Jeff has developed a diverse body of work, but his projects always tend to challenge the boundaries of conventional genres. Often employing his own footage, shot from trips around the world in 16mm, super 8, and video, Jeff also integrates found material into his films and installation works. He often prefers to screen his works outside of the traditional theatre from galleries to site-specific locales.

Jeff is perhaps best known locally as a film and video curator. In 1999, Jeff co-founded, together with colleague Alla Kovgan, the Balagan Film Series. Over the last seven years they have curated more than 100 programs of the foremost documentaries and alternative films from acclaimed local and international artists at venues such as the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the MFA, the Somerville Theatre, the Revolving Museum, the Independent Film Festival of Boston, The Boston Jewish Film Festival and the Boston Underground Film Festival.

Jeff is currently working on several of his own film and installation projects. Jeff is currently developing an installation project entiled Second Sight that explores the relation between motion and stasis by using a specialized camera to slow down one-second gestures to three-minutes. He is also currently editing Balkan Rhapsody: 78 films about Serbia and Kosovo, which is a feature length documentary/ cine-poem exploring the cultural intricacies and history of the conflict between Serbia, Kosovo and the NATO bombings in 1999. He is also a member of the Filmmakers Collaborative.

Jeff also worked professionally as a Multi-Media producer at MIT for over eight years. Among his many projects while at MIT, Jeff produced all of the over 100 reknowed Walter Lewin Physics videos found on MIT's OpenCourseWare and MIT World and recently conceived, developed and produced MIT’s new video podcast magazine called ZigZag. He is currently an adjunct professor at Emerson College and a teaching Fellow at Harvard University.