Oregon Media Arts Fellowships Awarded to Three Filmmakers

The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, established to recognize and support the work of Oregon film and video makers, announced its 2008 awards November 9 at the 35th Northwest Film & Video Festival to Portland filmmakers Brian Lindstrom, Andrew Blubaugh and Lawrence Johnson. Each received $5,000 Fellowships administered by the Northwest Film Center.

The Fellowship program is funded by the Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Gordon D. Sondland and Katherine J. Durant Foundation, with additional in-kind support from The Oregon Film & Video Office and Chambers Communications.

The goal of the Media Arts Fellowship program is to support outstanding moving image artists who live in Oregon and whose work shows exceptional promise and demonstrated commitment to the media arts. A distinguished panel reviewed submissions from 35 applicants from throughout the state, weighing artistic merit, the potential of the proposed activity to advance the artist’s work, and the feasibility of the projects proposed.

Brian Lindstrom’s award includes $5,000 in cash and a suite of studio production services provided by Chambers Communications in Eugene. Brian Lindstrom's feature-length documentary FINDING NORMAL was selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten films of 2007. It had extended runs at local theaters and was broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting. Other documentaries include FROM THE GROUND UP, which won a Telly Award in 2003; IT’S AN AGE THING, a thirteen-part series on aging for WMHT in New York; and KICKING, distributed by Pyramid Media and broadcast on OPB. He holds an MFA in Directing and Screenwriting from Columbia University.


Andrew Blubaugh, recipient of a $5,000 award, was named one of “25 New Faces in Independent Film” by Filmmaker magazine in 2007. He is a self-taught filmmaker and performer whose work has been exploring the connections between his own life and the greater human experience for ten years. His experimental documentations have screened at the Sundance, Ann Arbor, Seattle International, and Clermont-Ferrand Film Festivals, as well as many other venues worldwide. In 2006 he was named a Fellow of the Program For Media Artists (formerly the Rockefeller Fellowship), the first Oregonian to be honored.


Lawrence Johnson, recipient of a $5000 award, was educated in film studies at the California Institute for the Arts, and holds a B.A. in Humanities from California State University, Northridge. He is an award-winning filmmaker, and has produced more than 40 historical and cultural documentaries.


The Fellowship jurors were Enie Vaisburd, Assistant Professor, Media Arts, Pacific University; Sean Hutchinson, Producer, OPB; and David Walker, Film Critic, Longbaugh Film Festival Director and past Oregon Media Arts Fellowship winner.