Kelly Gallagher
Experimental filmmaker and animator Kelly Gallagher, an associate professor of film in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Department of Film and Media Arts, has received a 2024 Creative Capital Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact Award in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image.
Creative Capital awarded a total of $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen via a democratic process of external peer review out of 5,600 applications, the 28 successful visual arts project proposals and 22 film/moving image project proposals, representing 54 artists in total, were awarded on the basis of their innovative new approaches to painting, drawing, sculpture, public art, video art, architecture and design, printmaking, installation, documentary film, experimental film, narrative film and socially engaged forms. The award provides each individual artist with unrestricted project funding of $50,000.
Gallagher won for her project “By All Your Memories,” a documentary film that explores three topics: histories of Irish and Palestinian solidarity, the politics of early Irish immigrants in America regarding the abolition of slavery, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy and subsequent incarceration of Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. Using collage filmmaking strategies, oscillating between super 8mm film, found footage and handcrafted experimental animation, Gallagher asks her audience to engage with competing historical narratives.
A still from “By All Your Memories,” a film by Kelly Gallagher
As an anti-capitalist and prison abolitionist who grew up in an Irish-American Catholic household, stories of Irish resistance have always surrounded Gallagher. When she recently learned about Robert Kennedy’s assassination and Sirhan’s conviction, she was motivated to examine the historical relationship between Palestine and Ireland and the complexities of their legacies of solidarity.
“I am honored, ecstatic and humbled to receive this award and incredible support for my first feature film,” says Gallagher. “I believe that a majority of the filmmaking process requires perseverance, resourcefulness, courage, community and believing in oneself. I hope this recognition of my own film work can encourage and inspire my students here at SU to believe in themselves and their own film projects and remember that their work is worthy and deserving of external support, excitement and encouragement as well.”
Gallagher’s work is rooted in themes of resistance, struggle, political histories and personal explorations. Her films often explore left, revolutionary histories. At other times her films serve as confrontations themselves, resistance made visual. She is interested in film as a tool to re-open and re-discuss radical histories and film as a tool of confrontation.
Gallagher’s handcrafted films and commissioned animations have screened at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and the Smithsonian Institution. Recent commissioned animations have screened on Netflix and PBS.
She has presented solo programs of her work at institutions including SFMOMA, Close-Up Cinema London, Balkanima, Visual Studies Workshop, Aurora Picture Show and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Helen Hill Award from New York University’s Orphan Film Symposium. Her latest film, “We Had Each Other,” about the solidarity of Irish Republican POW women, won the Research Award at the 2022 Athens International Film and Video Festival.
