Jake Sylvester Yuzna

Jake Yuzna is a film director and curator originally from Minneapolis, MN. For his work in film, Yuzna was the youngest recipient of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His debut feature, Open, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where it became the first American feature to receive the Teddy Jury Prize. Open was awarded additional prizes at the Tel Aviv Film Festival, NewFest and OutFest. Yuzna has also received awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, Jerome Foundation, IFP and Frameline Foundation, among others.

In addition, Yuzna’’s work has been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), the British Film Institute (BFI), Oberhausen Film Festival, Walker Art Center, PBS, Red Cat of Los Angeles, as well as more than 100 international film festivals.

In 2010, Yuzna became the first cinema curator appointed at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in NYC, where he directed programming until 2015. During this time, Yuzna curated the first American retrospective of Alejandro Jodorowsky, surveys of William Klein, Dario Argento, Gregg Araki, Roy Andersson, Takeshi Murata, as well as the medium of VHS, the New French Extremity, and others. In 2014, he curated MAD’’s first biennial and is the author of the first book published by the museum’’s education department, THE FUN: The Social Practice of Nightlife in NYC. Yuzna has also contributed to Performa: the NYC Biennial of Performance Art, MoMA PS1, and the 4th Moscow Biennale. Team Biographies