SUMMER FILM FEST COLLABORATOR BIOS • SAT JUN 12 4-11P

Robert Melton (b. 1980 Baytown, Texas) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Austin, Texas, where he received both his BA and MFA from the University of Texas. Through fields of painting, drawing, photography, and film, Melton attempts to summon memories, an impractical and at times clunky way of traveling backward in time to retrieve the irretrievable and reconcile the past with the present.

Virginia Lee Montgomery (b. 1986, Houston, Texas) is a polymath and multimedia artist. In 2008, She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2016, she earned her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture. Her artwork is a research practice of feminist metaphysics across video, performance, sound, and sculpture. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths, and machines as Montgomery deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres.

Francis Almendarez (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Houston, Texas. He received an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BFA in Sculpture/New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design. Almendarez works at the intersections of history, (auto)ethnography, and cultural production to make sense of and reconstruct identity. He uses them as tools to address memory and trauma, specifically of immigrant, queer, working-class bodies of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Diasporas.