MFA, Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts

Digital Video Production & Post-Production (Cinematography, Editing, Sound Design), Documentary and Experimental Film and Video

Laura Kraning is an experimental non-fiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts, where she taught in the Program in Film and Video from 2012-2017. She has a wide range of experience working in film and television production and post-production in both New York and Los Angeles, on documentary, animation, narrative, and experimental video art projects, specializing as a cinematographer, sound designer, and editor on independent documentaries. 

In her video work, Laura creates atmospheric visual and sonic portraits of hidden places at the intersection of nature and machine. Navigating landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime, her work has been described as a form of “esoteric archeology,” delving into an experience of the subconscious of a landscape. Informed by her early artistic practices as an abstract painter and sculptor, her films blend poetic observational digital cinematography, immersive sound design, associational montage, found text, and archival media, to evoke the uncanny and symbolic layers located within the physical landscape. Decoding spectacle and conjuring visions of absence and the fluidity of time, her work creates an experiential atmosphere in which the viewer is transported into a liminal space of neither past, nor present, into a landscape of the imagination. 

Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, museums, galleries and microcinemas, notably the BFI London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Art Toronto, Centre Pompidou, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Angus-Hughes Gallery, REDCAT Theater, Union Docs, Los Angeles Filmforum, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, among others. 

Laura is a recipient of the 2010 Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, 2016 Princess Grace Foundation Professional Development Grant, Jury Awards at the 2010 and 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Leon Speakers Award for Best Sound Design at the 2016 Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the 2016 Athens International Film and Video Festival. Her film Meridian Plain was nominated for a Tiger Shorts Award at the 2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam, received Special Jury Mention at the VideoEx International Experimental Film and Video Festival in Zurich, and received the Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinémas Film Festival in Marseiiles, France. Her latest film Las Breas, premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight in 2019.