John Warren is a film/video artist whose work explores the thresholds between past and present, the living and the dead, ordinary perception and visionary experience. Working primarily in 16mm and expanded cinema, he creates installations and single-channel works through in-camera multiple exposure, a practice he describes as “polyphonic vision,” using the materiality of film itself as a medium for thinking about time, displacement, and the histories embedded in physical terrain.
Warren is currently at work on Frontierland, an experimental documentary installation examining a thousand years of Middle Tennessee history, from the Mississippian mound culture along the Cumberland River to the foundations of early American settlement and Native removal. The work is being developed in association with Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice (EADJ), the Vanderbilt University initiative founded by MacArthur Fellow María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Anthology Film Archives; and at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival, Slamdance, Images Festival Toronto, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Recent works include a video installation presented at the 61st Biennale di Venezia at Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani; Future Tense (2017–2025), a 16mm two-channel installation exhibited at the Frist Art Museum; Bardo Concerto (2020), a meditation on beauty, darkness, and transcendence created in collaboration with composer Alicia Enstrom; and Phantom Engineer (2015), a 16mm cine-installation documenting Nashville's urban transformation. In 2018 he conceived and directed a large-scale interdisciplinary happening combining video installation, original choreography, and newly composed music, performed at the Track One warehouse as the centerpiece of Vanderbilt's Black Mountain College symposium. The Nashville Scene named it “Best Southern Art Revival.”
Warren is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University and holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts. He has received grants from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the New England LEF Foundation, and the Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship.
