Through rich imagery and an acute sense of visual metaphor, Edin Velez, one of the pioneers in video art, has consistently expanded the paradigms of the genre. Velez’s work in video and photography has always relocated the fabric and rhythms of a culture in the gestures and rituals of everyday life. Eschewing a conventional narrative voice, he orchestrates a confluence of associative elements to evoke, rather than analyze, the textures of a specific culture. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, he studied painting at the University of Puerto Rico and the School of Fine Arts of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.
He has been awarded both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships as well as the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for Excellence in Film and Video. His works have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Documenta 8, Sao Paolo Biennial, Tate Gallery, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center for the Arts, Paris, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, among others. They are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art: New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hara Museum, Japan, and others.
In 2000 he was an artist in residence at the World Trade Center where he created a site specific installation on the 91st Floor of Tower One. His award winning documentary on Japanese Butoh, Dance of Darkness, was broadcast nationally in the USA by PBS and internationally in France and Germany by ARTE TV. State of Rest and Motion, an experimental documentary premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight and screened at the 2017 Havana Film Festival and Doc LA, where it won the Best Experimental Film award.
Velez has received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, Independent Television Service (PBS), ARTE TV (France), The Jerome Foundation, Massachusetts Council for the Arts, Program for Art on Film (a collaboration between the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art). His large format photographic prints of subway riders have been exhibited at Stux Gallery, Nurture Art Gallery and others. He has been working on a long term photographic project in the NYC subway. Edin is a Professor at Rutgers University, Newark. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
