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webinar > Dante’s Inferno: a Discussion with Sandow Birk & Sean Meredith

The well-known Los Angeles artist and illustrator Sandow Birk and the director and screenwriter Sean Meredith will present their Dante’s Inferno (2008, 76 ‘- MoMA Film Archive permanent collection), a film adaptation of the homonymous volume illustrated by Birk with texts by Marcus Sanders (Chronicle Books, 2004), a modern adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. Almost one hundred years L’inferno by Giuseppe de Liguoro (1911), Sandow Birk, and writer Marcus Sanders, created a book based on Dante’s Inferno and inspired by the engravings of Gustave Doré, the great French illustrator. Director Sean Meredith and a team of artists led by Birk then worked for five years to animate the work, using exquisitely hand-drawn puppets and handmade special effects, set in a post-apocalyptic urban universe.

The initiative is part of original Dante on Film series, dedicated to the figure and work of the Supreme Poet in cinema and organized in coordination with the Italian Embassy in Washington DC and under the auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles. It is also part the celebrations for the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Italy and the United States and of “DANTE 700 nel Mondo“, the program promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri with 500 projects in over 100 locations around the world, that was launched on the occasion of DanteDì (March 25), and will continue until the 21st Week of the Italian Language in the World (October 18-24 – theme Dante, l’italiano.)

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SANDOW BIRK is Los Angeles artis who graduated from the Otis/Parson’s Art Institute. He frequently develops expansive, multi-media projects, that deals with contemporary life in its entirety. With an emphasis on social issues, frequent themes of his past work have included inner city violence, graffiti, political issues, travel, war, and prisons, as well as surfing and skateboarding. Over the years he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship for painting to Rio de Janeiro, a Getty Fellowship for painting, and a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Fellowship. In 2007 he was an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2008.

SEAN MEREDITH is currently Director and Partner at Track 16 Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. As filmmaker, he is the Director/Producer of Dante’s Inferno in 2007 (MoMA Film Archive permanent collection), shot at Track 16 when the gallery was housed at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, and of In Smog and Thunde in 2003 (premiered in Feature Competition at Slamdance Film Festival).

 

  • Organized by: Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles
  • In collaboration with: in coordination with the Embassy of Italy in Washington D.C. and in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institutes in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C.