Welcome to Summer/Fall 2024!

BFA Photography, Film Studies Minor, Ohio University
MFA Film, San Francisco Art Institute
PhD Media & Communications, European Graduate School

Denah Johnston is an experimental filmmaker, curator and writer who has been teaching Film History and Studies in person and online since 2008. Denah has been at CCSF since 2015 and has taught American Cinema (CINE 18), Film History sequence (CINE 20A/20B), Introduction to Film Studies (CINE 21),  The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (CINE 23A), Exploring Film Noir (CINE 23B), Cult Cinema (CINE 23C) and Women and Film (WGST 10).

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

As a teacher I challenge students to discover and articulate their individual responses to artists' works rather than buying into prefabricated attitudes and opinions about media.

I advocate for giving ourselves to a film’s world and ideas, its links to the past and possibilities for moving into the future. My courses are designed to help students get to the real reason(s) we form certain opinions about film and art, to detach from unexamined, habitual responses and relate to, resist or connect with material, the better to explore it. Understanding the effects and implications of audiences' continuous exposure to popular criticism has become a central theme in my own thinking as I explore the reception of work made by underrepresented producers including women, POC and LGBTQ filmmakers, cult, amateurs and auteurs.

In summary, my goal as a teacher is to enable students to become receptive and critical viewers, empowered creators and skillful producers of film.

ABOUT
Professor Johnston's award-winning films have been exhibited by the National Gallery of Art, BAMPFA, San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival,  Athens International Film & Video Festival, the Calder Foundation, Queer Salon Berlin, Officinema and are distributed by Canyon Cinema. Curatorial work includes experimental programs, talks and discussions at festivals, universities, galleries and salons worldwide, most recently in Australia and Mexico. Denah's Queer film programming  has been supported by the NEA and Warhol Foundation. Publications include writings on the artistic rebellion of avant-garde cinema from post-war to punk, auteur theory, the occult, women and queer filmmakers, and co-editing  agnesfilms, a website supporting feminist filmmaking from 2014-2024. Current research focuses on excavating and programming rarely screened prints from the vault and the women of Canyon Cinema. Professor Johnston recently presented a paper on the Women of Canyon Cinema at the University of Sussex in Brighton in June 2023 and is working on several film-related projects.

SELECT PRESENTATIONS/PUBLICATIONS

Women of Canyon Cinema, Roxie Theater, May 22, 2024

Post-Screening Discussion with Denah Johnston in conversation with Steve Anker, Antonella Bonfanti, Maia Cybelle Carpenter, Janis Crystal Lipzin, and Amy Reid.

Emerging from research on the many roles women have played in the history of Canyon Cinema, this program provides a glimpse into the array of films by women in the organization’s beginnings in the 1960s through the end of the 1990s. These filmmakers explore an array of aesthetic and conceptual approaches to topics from women at work behind the scenes as well as domestic life, sexism in art, puritanical attitudes about sexuality and life, complexities of love, issues of control, photographic reproduction, optical printing and feminist critique of pornography.

"Women of Canyon Cinema," Doing Women's Film and Television History Conference, Univeristy of Sussex, Brighton UK, June 2023

Brakhage Symposium: A Tribute to George Kuchar University of Colorado, Boulder. March 4-6, 2016. Curated and introduced a program of George Kuchar's films spanning from the late-1960s into the late 1970s to highlight his unique and varied sense of humor as well as the wide array of his modes of storytelling using the medium of film collaborating with other artists (Curt McDowell, George Segal and Donna Kerness).

“The Devil Made Me Do It. The Innovation and Influence of Benjamin Christensen's Häxan.” Abraxas Special Issue #2: Luminous Screen The Influence of the Esoteric in Cinema.. Ed. Jack Sargeant. Fulgur: London, 2014. Print.

"From Vault to Screen: Canyon Cinema 16mm." National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. July-August 2014. Co-programming an extensive series of eight screenings to highlight new acquisitions, recent restorations, archival and vintage prints from the Canyon collection. National Gallery of Art Summer Film Program.

“Lynne Ramsay: Outsider Auteur.” SCAN Journal of Media Arts Culture Special REVcon Issue. Eds. Jack Sargeant and Alex Munt. Macquire University, Australia. Vol. 10 No. 1, January 2013. Web.

No Future Now: A Nomadology of Resistance and Subversion, Atropos Press, 2012