Angelo Madsen Minax

Madsen Minax is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects span documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, collective and collaborative practices, and media installation. Madsen's projects draw on his history of participation in justice oriented communities, and aim to investigate and honor the entanglements of human connectivity and the nature of transformation.

Madsen received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. While playing in numerous bands and music projects, he began working with the ground-breaking non-profit media arts organization Beyondmedia Education, collaborating with LGBT youth to organize for social justice through the creation and distribution of their stories, as an editor from 2006-2010. During this time Madsen also toured the United States with his bluegrass duet Actor Slash Model, which released three records between 2006-2012 and toured the country many times over. On tour, Actor Slash Model began working on the documentary film Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance, which interviewed 21 transgender musicians in the US and Canada and was released to critical acclaim in 2010. After dozens of awards at film festivals throughout the world the film premiered on PBS, FreeSpeech TV, and CBC and is now a staple visual text in musicology and gender studies and is housed in hundreds of library collections throughout the world.

In 2008 Madsen co-founded the Threat Level Queer Shorts bi-monthly screening series that ran from 2008-2010 in Chicago, IL and Brooklyn, NY, bringing experimental cinema to the queer masses. The series served as a fundraiser for the completion of several Chicago-based documentary projects. In 2010 Madsen formed a new musical project, The Homoticons, who released one double-disc of 19 heartbreaking folk songs. He then completing an MFA at Northwestern University, finished the experimental narrative The Year I Broke My Voice, and created numerous essay, installation and short form video projects. From Northwestern Madsen went on to be a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 2012-14 and a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. In 2015 Madsen was in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and accepted a teaching position at the University of Memphis, where he began work on a Kairos Dirt & the Errant Vacuum. An unusual fantasy film to say the least, Madsen released Kairos Dirt in Memphis to a Best Feature Award at the IndieMemphis Film Festival, followed by dozens of microcinema and museum screenings.

Madsen's works have screened and exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), the Lincoln Center (NYC), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), The British Film Institute (UK), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), REDCAT (Los Angeles), SOMArts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn), the Public Library of Amsterdam, Yale University, Harvard University, Outfest, Newfest, Frameline, Reeling and dozens of LGBT Film festivals around the world from Osaka, Japan to Montevideo, Uruguay.

Recently Madsen was invited to the Berlinale DOC Station to develop his new film North By Current a gripping documentary/essay film which is now in production and supported by LEF Moving Image Foundation, the Vermont Arts Council, UnionDocs, and Queer|Art. Currently Madsen co-curates Anthology Film Archives' Cinema of Gender Transgression quarterly film series, his current solo musical project is called The Great Awakener and he is currently a Samuel Edes Foundation fellow as well as a Queer|Arts|Mentorship fellow. He lives between Brooklyn, NY and Burlington, VT, where he holds the rank of Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.