ATLAS 333
Biography
Melinda Barlow (Ph.D., New York University) taught at New York University, New York’s School of Visual Arts, and Queens College, CUNY, before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado. The editor of Mary Lucier: Art and Performance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), Professor Barlow is a film and video historian and curator who specializes in work by contemporary women film and video makers, and also writes about the art of mentoring women. Through research supported by CU’s LEAP organization (Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion), she has developed and organized more than 50 local and national workshops on mentoring, and written about pedagogy for the National Education Association journals The Advocate and NEA Today, including: “Watch the Room Come Alive: Teaching With Film” (2010) and “In Praise of Positive Role Models” (2005). Numerous other articles on film and contemporary art have appeared in books and journals such as There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Wayne State UP, 2009), Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box (UK: Peter Lang, 2007), FLOW, Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Millennium Film Journal, Art Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Art in America, Afterimage, Sculpture, American Theatre, and the Spanish animation journal Animac.
Professor Barlow served as Curatorial Consultant for the exhibition “Locating Secret Psychological Space” at the Florida State Museum of the Arts in Tallahassee in 2007, curated Primal Seen: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Collection of Photography from the 19th Century to the Present” with Lisa Tamiris Becker in 2012, and programmed “1959: A Golden Year on the Silver Screen” at the SIE Film Center in Denver with Matthew Campbell in 2014. She has written catalog essays on moving image installation, photography, and performance art for the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington D.C. (“A Room Adrift,” 2001), Colorado College (“The Architecture of Desire,” 2008), the CU Art Museum (“Primal Seen,” 2012), and the feminist performance collaborative The Bridge Club (“The Guise of Good Behavior,” Art Palace: Houston, 2015). In 2014, Professor Barlow facilitated the St. John’s Summit on Women in Media at the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival in Newfoundland, Canada, and she has recently vetted scripts, programmed films, organized panels, and given lectures for the Athena Film Festival in New York City, the Vancouver International Women’s Film Festival, the Female Eye Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival Higher Learning Film Series in Toronto, and the Women + Voices Film Festival in Denver.
Awards and Works
A recipient of the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Award in Video Criticism from the Video Data Bank, Professor Barlow has received four teaching awards from CU: the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award, the Dean’s Senior Honors Teaching Fellowship, the Gold Best Should Teach Award from the Graduate Teacher Program, and the Marinus Smith Award from the CU Parents Association. She received the Dorothy Martin Woman Faculty Award, the Women Who Make a Difference Award, and the Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of Colorado, and was awarded a Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts in 2005 to participate in their “Powers of Wonder” Seminar. The founder of the Leah Kelly Memorial Award, the first CU Film Studies Program award in the critical study of cinema, Professor Barlow is the Honors Council representative for Film Studies, and the Faculty Advisor for the Undergraduate Academy Lead TA Pre-Prof Program. She teaches Film History I & II, Women and Film, courses on individual decades of American film history, and upper-level seminars on topics such as Snapshots, Memoirs & Home Movies; Magic, Wonder & Cinema; Stories We Tell: Dreams/Histories/Narratives; and Ephemeral Media: Film/Video/Installation. She is currently writing a memoir on film, art, female identity, and the process of collecting titled My Museum: A Memoir in Art.