Amir George

Amir George is an American filmmaker, artist, and curator. He is best known for Black Radical Imagination an international touring experimental film program he co-founded with Erin Christovale.

Amir grew up on the Southside of Chicago. He attended Columbia College Chicago between 2005-2007. After deciding to drop out Amir continued to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Amir began to shoot music videos for local musicians while organising independent film screenings in Chicago. Amir’s student short film Sneaker Freak crept onto burgeoning hip hop blogs in 2008, due to it featuring an unreleased song by The Cool Kids. In 2011, he directed a short film The Mind of Delilah starring Thai Tyler, and The Twilite Tone. In 2017, he released a short film entitled Decadent Asylum.

Amir films have screened at institutions and film festivals including Anthology Film Archives, Glasgow School of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit , Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among others. In 2018, Amir became a programmer at True/False Film Fest.

In 2007, Amir started The Cinema Culture as a programming platform for Chicago based experimental filmmakers. In 2012, The Cinema Culture set out on their first touring program, Watch This! Cinema Culture now functions as a film label focusing on exhibition and distribution.

Black Radical Imagination is international film program founded by Amir George and Erin Christovale. The films feature contextualized afrofuturist ideas through contemporary experimental films created by black filmmakers. The first consecutive screenings took place in 2013 in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago between Feb-May. In June that year, Black Radical Imagination was invited to screen at Mickalene Thomas’s Art Bar Installation, Better Days in Basel, Switzerland. The Black Radical Imagination curated film programs have screened in art and cultural institutions including MoMA PS1, MOCA, Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.