About

The Nightingale Cinema is a rough and ready microcinema that was located in Chicago's Noble Square neighborhood from 2008-2022, and is now working with partner exhibition spaces to present roving cinematic programming. Programming strains include expanded cinema, new media, experimental narrative, documentary, and video art. The Nightingale Cinema is a proud supporter of artist, activist, underground, outre, avant-garde, après-garde, unconventional, independent, forgotten, and unforgettable cinema. Projection capabilities include 16mm and digital formats. Operated with a gift economy by an informal volunteer community of programmers, projectionists, critics, and artists, the Nightingale screens film and video artists both local and international. Always striving to collaborate with other organizations, the Nightingale hosted an average of 50 events a year including screenings, performances, festivals, live studio shoots, workshops, and artist talks. Since opening its doors in 2008, the Nightingale has shown the work of hundreds of artists to thousands of attendees.

Mission

The Nightingale believes in cinema as a collective and bodily event bringing audiences and artists together for vital and illuminating exchange. The Nightingale’s mission is to present experimental and independent moving image work by emerging and established makers in a cinema context.

Staff

Emily Eddy, Director, is a film, video, digital media artist and curator based in Chicago. She has curated film, video, and media works at the Nightingale Cinema since 2013. Emily served as Programmer of the Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival, a project of Chicago Filmmakers, for the 2018-2020 iterations of the festival. Most recently, Emily held the position of Development and Marketing Manager at Video Data Bank where she promoted artists’ video. She received an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020.

Christy LeMaster, Founding Director, is the Artistic Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre and the Maryland Film Festival based in Baltimore. Previously she lived in Chicago for 15 years where she worked as a programmer, educator, and producer interested in collectivity, platform, and collaborative processes. She founded Chicago’s cooperatively-helmed microcinema The Nightingale and co-programmed itinerant experimental doc series Run of Life at spaces around the city, including experimental music venue Constellation. From 2017-19, she worked as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, organizing programs and exhibitions for the Commons, the museum’s site for art and civic engagement. She also taught media theory at Columbia College Chicago, has been a movie critic on WBEZ, and an editor of CINE-FILE.info. Her writing has been published by INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, Brooklyn Rail, and Green Lantern Press. Her projects since the start of the pandemic include acting as the Friday editor for The Quarantine Times and co-organizing the Chicago Cinema Workers Fund.

Raul Benitez, Programmer, has been involved with the Chicago Film Community through the Chicago Underground Film Festival for the past 11 years. He has previously volunteered for The Chicago Cinema Society before taking over the film programming at Comfort Station Logan Square in 2013. Currently he is programming at Comfort Station Logan square, screening movies and volunteering for this years Chicago Underground Film Festival and volunteering for Onion City Festival.

Jory Drew, Programmer, is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Their work reckons with the social constructions of race, gender, and love and how they influence the economic, legal, and political conditions that affect black intimacy and liberation. They have exhibited locally and nationally and have participated in residencies at Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago,IL), ACRE (Steuben, WI/Chicago, IL.), Open Kitchen (Milwaukee, WI.), and Hot Box (Austin, TX.). They are currently a co-lead artist for the Teen Creative Agency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and may also be recognized as a Co-founder of F4F, a domestic venue in Little Village, and a Co-organizer of Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for black people along the spectrum of femininity.

Drew Durepos, Programmer, is a filmmaker living in Chicago. His short films investigate narrative structures through experimental modes and often involve loved ones, appropriated sources and inane visual effects. His experiences in commercial production, spanning micro-budget features to studio films and network television shows, inform his approach and haunt his dreams. His work has screened at London Short Film Festival, Athens International Film & Video Festival, Drunken Film Festival Oakland, Tacoma Film Festival, and Onion City Experimental Film + Video Film Festival. He received his MFA from the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2018. He teaches at UW–Milwaukee and Loyola University Chicago.

Zachary Hutchinson, Programmer, is an artist living and working in Chicago IL. Hutchinson came to Chicago in 2010 to attend school at the School of the Art Institute Chicago where she earned her BFA in interdisciplinary arts in 2015. Hutchinson continued her education at the University of Illinois - Chicago earning a MFA in moving image in 2017. She has shown work globally in places like Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco CA, NYC, Los Angeles CA, Portland OR, Austin TX, Berlin Germany, Athens Greece, Glasgow United Kingdom, Iceland, Venice, and extensively in Chicago IL. She is currently an adjunct professor at UIC and was recently listed as one of the Chicago Film 50 for the 2020.

David Langkamp, Programmer, was born and raised on the soft suburban streets of Rockford, Illinois. After developing an early love of cartoons and comics, he dabbled in animation while earning a BFA in studio art from Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. After moving to New York, David took advantage of his day job at New York University to earn a master’s degree in animation from their (now-defunct) CADA program. From 2010-2017 he volunteered with ASIFA East, the New York chapter of an international animation organization for professionals and aficionados.

Jesse Malmed, Programmer, is an artist and curator living and working in Chicago. His work in moving images, performance, text and occasional objects has exhibited widely in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns, including recent solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Mothlight Microcinema, Artists’ Television Access, D Gallery, Syntax Season, Microlights, Echo Park Film Center, Lease Agreement, and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center.

Caitlin Ryan, Programmer, is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the nuances between comedy and humor, specifically using the vernacular of the uncanny to investigate systems of anthropology. Ryan is interested in small underground (and sometimes temporary) communities to observe perspectives that push the boundaries of what it means to have radical empathy. Caitlin received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has most recently shown works at Iceberg Projects, Flatlands, Gallery 400, and Hyde Park Art Center. She has also screened works at Onion City Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, Cosmic Rays, and the Nightingale Cinema.

Kat Sachs, Programmer, is a cinephile and programmer from Dayton, Ohio. She is the associate editor of CINE-FILE.info, where she writes about film on a weekly basis. Highlights of her programming endeavors include a recent Barbara Hammer retrospective and past screenings of Dan Sallitt's HONEYMOON and ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA, the Chicago premiere of Joanna Arnow's I HATE MYSELF :), and a ten-week Frederick Wiseman series at Doc Films, entirely on 16mm, as well as a one-off screening of Wiseman's six-hour NEAR DEATH, also on 16mm. On average, she watches two movies per day, often with her husband, critic and occasional-programmer Ben Sachs, and their two cats, Squeeks and Chloe.

Programmers Emeriti

Eddy Crouse, Ian Curry, Lee Ferdinand, LJ Frezza, Lorenzo Gattorna, Jillian Hansen-Lewis, Sara Holwerda, Nellie Kluz, Emily Kuehn, Sally Lawton, JB Mabe, Valentina Manzoni, Chloe McLaren, Douglas McLaren, Jenny Miller, Ben Sachs, Fern Silva, Nabil Vega, Aaron Walker, Michael Wawzenek.