Julie Dash
In conversation with Hamza Walker

Julie Dash’s landmark practice has reshaped the language of cinema, opening space for new ways of seeing, remembering, and narrating Black life. A pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion, Dash emerged alongside a generation of filmmakers dedicated to reimagining Black cinema outside dominant industry frameworks. Her work is marked by a distinct visual grammar of layered sound, nonlinear editing, and richly composed tableaux that position figures in dynamic relation to the landscapes they inhabit.

Thirty-five years ago, Dash’s groundbreaking film Daughters of the Dust (1991), set in 1902 among the Gullah communities—descendants of enslaved Africans—on the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, marked a historic turning point as the first feature by an African American woman to receive a wide theatrical release in the United States. Winner of the Sundance Award for Best Cinematography, the film remains a touchstone for its lyrical, nonlinear approach to storytelling and its profound engagement with migration and cultural inheritance.

Moving fluidly across time, voice, and perspective, Dash’s work resists conventional narrative structure in favor of a cinematic language attuned to the textures of lived experience, foregrounding the rooted interplay between a community and a landscape, and the way place becomes an active agent in the making of meaning. For Dash, acts of staging—whether cinematic, musical, or ceremonial—mediate how histories are collectively held. This keynote offers an opportunity to revisit her enduring contributions as an artist, and her foundational influence on Black feminist subjectivity, contemporary art and cinema, and experimental narrative form.

In this keynote address, Dash reflects on Daughters of the Dust alongside her recent short film HOMEGOING (2025), a “collaborative musical tribute” with opera singer Davoné Tines that commemorates the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Dash will be in conversation with Hamza Walker, curator of MONUMENTS, a major exhibition at The Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles where HOMEGOING was recently on view. 

Julie Dash is a filmmaker, writer and visual artist whose cinematic landscapes explore racial racial justice, diasporic identity, migration, and the lives of Black women across film, television, installation, and public history projects. Working across narrative film, television, video, museum installations, and public history projects, Dash creates richly layered worlds that illuminate historical memory, cultural inheritance, and the enduring legacies of displacement and belonging.

Hamza Walker is a curator and the executive director of The Brick (formerly LAXART) in Los Angeles. His curatorial work, notably the large-scale exhibition MONUMENTS (2025), frequently addresses complex societal issues through the lens of contemporary art, contributing to critical dialogues around race, memory, and public space. 

The Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes are made possible through a major gift from Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.

Presented in association with Aspen Film.

__

Registration required. 

If you have questions about Membership or the different access benefits at each Membership level, please email membership@aspenartmuseum.org.

The Aspen Institute campus includes multiple venues with varying accessibility features. Shuttle service will operate continuously from the Aspen Art Museum from 11AM to 12PM. If you require accessibility accommodations, including wheelchair access or assistance, please contact us at air@aspenartmuseum.org at least 48 hours in advance so we can evaluate and coordinate reasonable accommodations .

Image: Still from “Seeking: Mapping Our Gullah Geechee Story,” 2023. Directed by Julie Dash.