Michael Gitlin has been making media work since the mid-1980s. His early films and videos were most often engaged with teasing apart the mechanics of narrative. This period of work culminated in the short feature, Berenice (1996), which is very loosely adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name and was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Other projects involve a more purely formal experimentation, such as Shudder (top and bottom) (2001) and Dust Studies (2010), which premiered in the Views from the Avant-garde section of the 2010 New York Film Festival. The main body of Gitlin’s work for more than a decade has been a series of research-based experimental essay films that examine American social or cultural phenomena. This set of projects began in 2000 with the short video, Nine Guided Tours, about commercialized cave tours in Pennsylvania, and has continued since then with a series of long-form pieces. The Birdpeople (2004), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and was acquired by the museum for its permanent collection in 2007, investigates the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart, birdwatching. The Earth Is Young (2009), for which Gitlin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, is an examination of the rhetorical strategies and re-contextualized natural history imagery employed by Young Earth Creationists, counter-pointed with images of the slow and patient work of conventional paleontologists. In addition to the Guggenheim, Gitlin’s work has been supported by grants from the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts,  and The New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. Gitlin received a B.A. in Philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1978, and a M.F.A. in Filmmaking from Bard College, Annandale, NY, in 1995. He teaches at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he holds the rank of Associate Professor.Michael Gitlin has been making media work since the mid-1980s. His early films and videos were most often engaged with teasing apart the mechanics of narrative. This period of work culminated in the short feature, Berenice (1996), which is very loosely adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name and was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Other projects involve a more purely formal experimentation, such as Shudder (top and bottom) (2001) and Dust Studies (2010), which premiered in the Views from the Avant-garde section of the 2010 New York Film Festival. The main body of Gitlin’s work for more than a decade has been a series of research-based experimental essay films that examine American social or cultural phenomena. This set of projects began in 2000 with the short video, Nine Guided Tours, about commercialized cave tours in Pennsylvania, and has continued since then with a series of long-form pieces. The Birdpeople (2004), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and was acquired by the museum for its permanent collection in 2007, investigates the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart, birdwatching. The Earth Is Young (2009), for which Gitlin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, is an examination of the rhetorical strategies and re-contextualized natural history imagery employed by Young Earth Creationists, counter-pointed with images of the slow and patient work of conventional paleontologists. In addition to the Guggenheim, Gitlin’s work has been supported by grants from the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts,  and The New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. Gitlin received a B.A. in Philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1978, and a M.F.A. in Filmmaking from Bard College, Annandale, NY, in 1995. He teaches at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he holds the rank of Associate Professor.