photo: Masiel Acevedo
SETH FEIN
I'm a Brooklyn-born-and-raised historian and filmmaker working at the corner of public humanities and documentary art.
That's the intersection where I've built Seven Local Film –– between local stops on the 7 train –– in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I've lived since 2010.
My beliefs –– that cultures can only be seen locally and that history is art, inevitably created more than excavated –– steer my projects.
April 10, 2020, Jackson Heights
I've taught in Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, Barnard, Columbia, NYU, and Yale, where, between 2002 and 2010, I was a professor of History (US-World Relations), Film, Latin American and American Studies, and where I received Yale's Poorvu Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Instruction (for my course The Idea of the Western Hemisphere), its Graduate Mentorship Prize for the Humanities, and a McCredie Fellowship in Instructional Technology, which inadvertently facilitated my move from writing about audiovisual art to making it.
photo: CB House
Between Neighborhoods (2016-2024)
Small Kitchens (2023)
I am also at work on Our Neighborhood, a feature-length documentary that examines Washington's secret production of television propaganda for Latin America across the Sixties. Grants from the American Council of
Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities funded
its archival research and a year as a fellow in multimedia history at Harvard's Charles Warren Center supported its development.
poster: Don Calva
My travels from film historian to filmmaker generate my documentary practice. After completing public school in Brooklyn –– at PS 307, PS 197, Andries Hudde/JHS 240, and Midwood HS –– I studied History at Cornell University. And, following a couple of years working in used and out-of-print book stores in Manhattan –– shelving History at the Strand before traversing Union Square to learn how to buy and price at Academy –– I moved to Austin to do my Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas, where my dissertation, Hollywood and United States-Mexico Relations in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, won the Barnes Lathrop Prize. My doctoral research included two world-changing years living in Mexico City, transformative ones for me as well as for Mexico. That experience grounded much of my published scholarship, which focuses on film, television, propaganda, and the history of the
Americas across the Depression, Second World War, and Cold War. It also drove my approach to transnationalism, which was, back then, a new idea, one that resonates through the social lense my docs deploy today.
Just as my scholarship's analytic and expressive ambitions pushed me into documentary art, audiovisual experimentation has spawned new writing.
Two recent pieces –– one in the Village Voice and another in the Los Angeles Review of Books –– addressing recent works by the documentary artist Bill Morrison emerged from my own practice's contemplation of audiovisual art as history. Meanwhile, my work and life around Unisphere has prompted archive-derived transhistorical essays, in writing as well as video, about transnational NYC's present and past –– viewed from Queens.