David Gatten

In 2015 Gatten was invited to become part of the international practiced-based research project "RESET THE APPARATUS!" based in Vienna, Austria. In addition to his work in Vienna, Gatten's films were the subject of a recent retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. In 2016 he completed three new 16mm films.

Two of Gatten's newest works premiered in the Fall of 2012. The Extravagant Shadows is a 175-minute work of high-definition digital cinema. It premiered at Lincoln Center in the New York Film Festival. The Extravagant Shadows was recently named the one of the "Top 10 Undistributed Movies of 2012" by a Film Comment international film critics poll magazine.

In November 2011 Texts of Light: A Mid-Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films by David Gatten, curated by Chris Stults, opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The three program retrospective screened in 2012 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Harvard Film Archive; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues in San Francesco; and at REDCAT, The LA Film Forum, and The Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles.

The second film in the cycle, The Great Art of Knowing, is generally regarded at Gatten's most important film and was listed among the "50 Best Films of the Decade" in a 2010 Film Comment critics poll.

Among other projects, he is currently working on a series of films entitled Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts, a project which Artforum magazine called "one of the most erudite and ambitious undertakings in recent cinema." He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to continue work on this series of films exploring the library of William Byrd II of Westover (1674–1744) and the lives of William Byrd and his daughter Evelyn Byrd (1707–1737).

Portions of the cycle have been included in the 2002 and 2006 Whitney Biennial exhibitions and in 2011 all four completed parts were included in "The Unfinished Film" exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, alongside works by Joseph Cornell, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, and Andy Warhol.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Media Studies and Art History. Gatten received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, where he studied with Tatsu Aoki, Daniel Eisenberg and Shellie Fleming. He is married to the filmmaker and writer Erin Espelie. They live together in the historic mining camp of Salina, Colorado, in Four Mile Canyon, Boulder County, with their daughter, Darwin Salina Gatten-Espelie.

Since 1996, Gatten has been at work on a nine-part film series that takes as inspiration the 4,000-volume library of William Byrd II, an American colonial writer, planter, and government official. The individual films explore one or more titles from the library while also elliptically describing episodes in the lives of Byrd and his daughter Evelyn. At least four parts were completed; the fifth part was in progress between 2005 and 2009. Curator and writer Henriette Huldisch described the cycle as follows: "Focusing on specific volumes from the library, letters, and personal papers, Gatten's series probes the relationship between printed words and images, philosophical ideas, historical records, and biography. Throughout, his thematic concerns are realized in an array of cinematic processes and techniques, constituting a parallel survey of the medium's history."

David Edward Gatten (Born February 11, 1971 Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. Since 1996 Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image, cataloging the variety of ways in which texts functions in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employee cameraless techniques, combined with close-up cinematography and optical printing processes. In addition to the ongoing 16mm films, Gatten is now making hybrid 16mm/digital works and has completed an entirely digital feature-length project called The Extravagant Shadows.

Gatten was born on February 11, 1971, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Robert and Florence Gatten. He lived in Michigan and Ohio until 1978, when the family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. Gatten's interest in the moving image originated in the mid-1980s, while in junior high school, when he began writing video game software with the TRS-80 operating system.