Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over eighty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation, approximately a dozen remain on view. His work has appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted the Tom Berner Award for community service and two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary. He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and as the experimental film co‐ordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Since 2004 he has been working on Fringe Online (www.fringeonline.ca), a web project which makes available the archives of 40 Canadian media artists.
“Meeting Mike Hoolboom — through films, criticism, or projects he has curated — is encountering sensitive, complex, and deeply humanistic thinking about the body, memory, perception, and experiences of human interaction. Hoolboom is a Canadian icon of avant‐garde cinema who has worked in the visual arts for over 30 years, and during that time, he has developed a complete artistic identity; his artistic, intellectual, pedagogical, and research practices overlap with one another and interweave with the circumstances and experiences of his own life.” — Maria Shcherbakova