B. J. Bullert grew up in Seattle, the youngest of four, the daughter of a civil engineer and a stay-at-home mom.

She never imagined being a filmmaker – her mom wanted her to be a flight attendant or a bank teller, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, she went to college at The Evergreen State College, and then to Boston University where she studied with historian Howard Zinn and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

She later went on to earn a M.Litt. from Oxford in politics. During her history of ideas studies at Oxford, she perceived how insular the academic world could be as hard-working scholars wrote for small audiences of peers, disconnected from the larger world where US proxy wars were killing tens of thousands in central America and apartheid reigned in South Africa.

She switched directions away from academia and discovered the fun, potential and pitfalls of documentary film making.

In the 1980s, she co-produced two films with a fellow filmmaker John de Graaf – God and Money (PBS 1986) and then Circle of Plenty (PBS stations 1987). Then, after hitting a fundraising wall, she returned to university for a doctorate. While in grad school, she produced and directed Earl Robinson Ballad of an American (1995).

With doctorate in hand, she taught at Muhlenberg College and American University, and was awarded a Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard. Then she returned to the Pacific Northwest.

Back home, she produced several documentaries with a regional focus: Alki: Birthplace of Seattle (1998), Chief Seattle (2001), a short film, Space Needle at 40 (2002), pair of films about Seattle’s Fishermen’s Terminal (2005 & 2015), Everett DuPen: Sculptor (2007) and Dancing Lives (2013). For more information, visit www.seattlefilms.org

Since 2007, she has been on the Core Faculty at Antioch University, Seattle.

Shamim M. Momin is the Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery. Prior to joining the Henry in 2018, she was director, curator, and co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a nonprofit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects, in Los Angeles and beyond. Previously, Momin served for more than ten years at the Whitney Museum of American Art, co-curating the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials and overseeing the Contemporary Projects series. In her role as Branch Director at Altria, the Whitney’s midtown space, she commissioned more than 50 contemporary projects. In Plain Sight is Shamim’s first large-scale exhibition curated at the Henry.

Photo: Shamim M. Momin, Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, seated within Sadie Barnette’s installation, Room to Live (2019). Courtesy of the Henry Art Gallery.