West Lounge (2023)

​​Kevin Jerome Everson (USA) is an artist born in Mansfield, Ohio in 1965. His films frequently depict Black working-class communities, stretching across a variety of themes and subjects including migration, illusion, astronomy, human kinetics, entomology, historical reenactment, musicology, ornithology, and folktale. He received an MFA from Ohio University (1990). Everson has completed more than 300 films since 1997, quietly assembling one of the most remarkable collections of contemporary African American life ever committed to cinema. His films have been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Encontro de Cinema Negro, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Toronto International Film Festival, Walker Art Museum, BlackStar Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Venice Film Festival. He has received retrospectives at Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Harvard Film Archive, Tate Modern, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, Visions du Réel, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Media City Film Festival. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International, the 2023 Contour Biennale, and the 2024 Thailand Biennale. He has received an American Academy in Rome Prize (2002), a Herb Alpert Award (2012), a Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), an American Academy in Berlin Prize (2020), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants and commissions from Creative Capital, LAXART, and Sundance Art of Non-Fiction. Media City Film Festival has screened more than 50 films by Everson since 2009 and has hosted him as an artist in residence. He lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is a professor of Art at the University of Virginia.