Rian Brown-Orso

  • Professor of Cinema and Media
  • Codirector, Apollo Outreach Initiative
  • Codirector, Apollo Center for Media Education and Production

Areas of Study

Education

  • BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, 1994
  • MFA, University of California San Diego, 2000

Biography

Rian Brown-Orso is an award-winning independent filmmaker, visual artist, and associate professor of cinema and media at Oberlin College. Brown-Orso’s work spans a variety of film genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, and video installation. 

In 2015, she was awarded grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation’s Just Films initiative for the production of The Foreigner’s Home, a full-length documentary film about Toni Morrison at the Louvre, which was released in 2017.

Her works have screened internationally at film festivals and museums including Rotterdam International Film Festival, British Film Institute, BAM, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, L.A Hammer, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Harvard Film Archive, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Anchorage Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Santa Fe International Film Festival, Miami Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Women in the Director’s Chair and others. Reflecting Brown-Orso’s background in visual arts and cinematography, her films employ visually dynamic imagery, hand-painted animation, and experimental techniques.

She codirected Blue Desert ~ Towards Antarctica, a multichannel video installation shot during an expedition to Antarctica with National Geographic.

Brown-Orso was associate producer for a feature documentary, Raise the Roof, a heroic story about rebuilding a Polish synagogue that appeared on PBS in 2017. It won Best Documentary in the Seattle Jewish Film Festival. The film was screened in over 60 film festivals worldwide.

In 2009, she cofounded and codirected the Apollo Outreach Initiative, a media education program that works with urban youth in the Northeast Ohio. She has received numerous awards including three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence awards. She also worked as an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Brown-Orso grew up in Boston and studied visual art at Massachusetts College of Art and received a Master of Fine Arts in film from the University of California, San Diego. Her work focuses on women’s issues, social justice, and experimenting with new forms of animation and time-based art.

Fall 2024

Animation Workshop: Stop-Motion Animation from Analog to Digital — CIME 313
First Person Cinema: Personal Narrative — CIME 326

Spring 2025

Experiments in Moving Image and Sound I — CIME 322
Experiments in Moving Image and Sound I — CIME 322OC
Advanced Filmmaking Projects — CIME 475

Notes

Rian Brown-Orso Gives Commentary

April 3, 2020

Rian Brown-Orso, associate professor of cinema studies, gave video commentary for CAN Journal that included her reflections about teaching art online during the time of COVID-19. 

Rian Brown-Orso and Geoff Pingree's Film Reviewed in Journal

January 11, 2020

Associate Professor of Cinema Studies Rian Brown-Orso and Professor of Cinema Studies and English Geoff Pingree's documentary film, The Foreigner's Home was reviewed by Shahram Khosravi, professor of anthropology at Stockholm University, in the journal Anthropology News.

News

Postcards from Oberlin

May 8, 2020

“The best thing about my quarantine workday (besides hanging out with my toddler) is seeing my students, even though they are far away. The second best thing is seeing them when it's warm enough to be outside in my backyard in Lakewood. Students + sunshine (+ toddler) = happiness,” writes Kathryn Metz , assistant professor of ethnomusicology.

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