Community/Nation/Tribe: enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa
Materials/Processes: Photography; Video/Film; Installation
Themes: identity, history, Indigenous futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage
Online Resources:
Statements/Bios in Artists’ Words:
Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain (she/her) is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a multimedia artist, and an educator. She was born into a family of artists and grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she learned how to ride a horse instead of a bike.
Her artwork explores identity, history, Indigenous futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage through lens based media and installations. Her mostly analog practice also includes beadwork, and live projector performances with her frequent collaborator, Jon Almaraz.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and has shown in several venues and festivals around the world, including billboard projects in Los Angeles through the Billboard Creative and Boston with For Freedoms, Cineteca Nacional México, the Autry Museum, Walker Art Center, Great Plains Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe Indian Market, the Ga ni tha Film Festival at the Venice Biennale Native American Pavillon in 2015, Los Angeles Filmforum, REDCAT, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in New York, ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Festival and Images Film Festival in Toronto, among many others.
Eve is currently a Mandel Institute Jewish Cultural Leadership Fellow. She has also received support for her work from the Sundance New Frontier Labs where she was a Fellow in 2019, and received a Sundance Indigenous MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. She was an inagural COUSIN Collective and Cinereach supported artist, and has recieved grants from the Mike Kelley Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has also been a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, and an Interactive Storyteller for Tribeca Film Institute.
In 2008 Eve earned a BA from Hampshire College, where she designed her own major in experimental film, photography, and Native American and Jewish Cultural Comparisons. She then participated in a filmmaking fellowship at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where she was recruited into the NBC Page Program in Los Angeles. In 2009, Eve became the Operations Manager of the Echo Park Film Center, a community non-profit arts organization, where she curated screenings, worked as a projectionist, and continues to serve in the international operational collective and teach classes to various communities. She earned an Inter-School dual MFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Film & Video and Photography & Media in 2014.
Eve also worked at CalArts as the Assistant Director of Admissions for the School of Film/Video for six years, a position in which she traveled around the world to recruit students, and as special faculty teaching alternative photographic processes and handmade filmmaking techniques. Eve currently teaches the online Portfolio Development Workshop for Experimental Film and Video Artists, and The Art of Filmmaking: Composition and the Moving Image on Coursera through CalArts Extended Studies. She has also taught Experimental Filmmaking at Otis College of Art and Design, and been a guest teaching critic in the IAIA MFA Studio Arts Program.
LaFountain recently moved back to Santa Fe to focus on her art practice invoking the landscape, community, and family. She and her partner and collaborator musician Jon Almaraz live on an ancient pathway that leads into the Old Santa Fe Trail with their new son and old cat.
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