Shari Frilot

{{short description|American film director}}

{{infobox person

|name=Shari Frilot

|birth_date={{birth date and age|1965|6|18}}

|nationality=American

|occupation={{flatlist|

• Artist
• filmmaker

}}

|awards=Peabody Award (2022)

}}

Shari Frilot (born June 18, 1965) is an artist, filmmaker, and chief curator of the New Frontier program at the Sundance Film Festival.{{Cite web|url=https://www.essence.com/awards-events/film-festivals/how-sundance-programmer-shari-frilot-keeps-film-festival-diverse/|title=How Sundance Programmer Shari Frilot Keeps the Film Festival Diverse|last=Herndon|first=Jessica|date=January 21, 2016|website=Essence}} She is the director of two short films (Fly Boy, 1989 and Strange & Charmed, 2003), and one documentary feature (Black Nations/Queer Nations?, 1995). Frilot has been chief curator of the New Frontier program since 2007, where she leads programming of new experimental American film and has developed an exhibition space at the Sundance Film Festival which hosts "digital artworks, media installations, and multimedia performance,"{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RUNRDwAAQBAJ|title=Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making|last1=Welbon|first1=Yvonne|last2=Juhasz|first2=Alexandra|publisher=Duke University Press|year=2018|isbn=978-0822371854}} including cinematic and artistic projects that make use of virtual reality technology.{{Cite web|url=https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-new-frontier-sundance-20150122-story.html|title=New Frontier exhibition at Sundance focuses on the future|date=2015-01-22|website=Los Angeles Times|language=en-US|access-date=2019-10-22}} In her role as chief curator of New Frontier, the integration of new technologies has included an international open call for VR-based projects, integration of haptic technologies, and the platforming of projects that made use of artificial intelligence in their creation.{{Cite web|url=https://www.documentary.org/online-feature/creating-new-world-conversation-shari-frilot-chief-curator-new-frontier|title=Creating a New World: A Conversation with Shari Frilot, Chief Curator, New Frontier|last=Jacobson|first=Ken|date=2018-03-28|website=International Documentary Association|language=en|access-date=2019-10-27}} Frilot has described the work of New Frontier by saying, "We wanted to cultivate an artistic and social environment to disarm people when they entered the space. It was a way of unlocking inhibitions and encouraging audiences to think about opening themselves up to the new rules and cinematic suggestions which the New Frontier artists are inviting you to consider."{{Cite journal|last1=Mousley|first1=Sheryl|last2=Frilot|first2=Shari|date=2016|title=New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival: 10 Years of Changing Boundaries|url=http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/LEON_a_01198|journal=Leonardo|language=en|volume=49|issue=2|pages=109–112|doi=10.1162/LEON_a_01198|s2cid=57564498 |issn=0024-094X}}

Her interests as a curator and a filmmaker are informed by her early experiences within a creative community of queer artists of color.{{Cite book|title=XII Black International Cinema Anthology 1993-1997|last1=Ferrera-Balanquet|first1=Raúl|last2=Harris|first2=Thomas Allen|publisher=Fountainhead|year=1997|chapter=Narrating Our History: A Dialogue among Queer Media Artists from the African Diaspora}} Alongside documentary filmmakers like Marlon Riggs, Cheryl Dunye, and Isaac Julien, Frilot was part of a generation of African-American directors whose work explicitly addressed issues of racial and sexual identity in the last two decades of twentieth century.{{Cite book|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60323165|title=Encyclopedia of African-American culture and history : the Black experience in the Americas|date=2006|publisher=Macmillan Reference USA|others=Palmer, Colin A., 1944-2019.|isbn=0028658167|edition= 2nd|location=Detroit|pages=629|chapter=Documentary Film|oclc=60323165}} From 1992 to 1996, she served as Director of the gay and lesbian experimental film festival MIX festival in New York City, where she also co-founded the first gay Latin American subsidiary film festivals, MIX BRASIL and MIX MEXICO. She also served as co-director of Programming for OUTFEST from 1998 to 2001, where she founded the festival's Platinum Oasis, which introduced cinematic performance installation and performance to the festival for the first time.{{Cite web|url=http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-media-theory/curating-physical-cinema-at-sundances-new-frontier/|title=Curating 'Physical Cinema' at Sundance's New Frontier|last=Rastegar|first=Roya|date=Summer 2012|website=The Scholar and Feminist Online: Barnard Center for Research on Women|language=en-US|access-date=2019-10-27}} In 2010, she was a featured speaker at the University of California, Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, where she presented a talk entitled "The Power of the Erotic: Curatorial Strategies at Sundance's New Frontier."{{Cite web|url=http://atc.berkeley.edu/|title=The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium|website=ATC Lecture Series|language=en|access-date=2019-10-27}}