OBERLIN, OHIO--Experimental filmmaker Rian Brown-Orso, who describes herself as a "time-based image maker," will screen three of her works--Presence of Water, Saca Una Foto and The Settler--Thursday, November 30 at 8 p.m. at Oberlin College.

Brown-Orso is the cofounder of Wandering Films, a small international multimedia collaborative, as well as an assistant professor in Oberlin’s art department, where she teaches digital-video production and sound design.

She says: "Being a ‘time-sculptor’, film and digital video are the tools I use to record fragments of life, real or imaginary. …Working with a medium that evokes ideas in-time is what intrigues me, because, like music, it exists ultimately in the memory."

Brown-Orso shot Presence of Water "with her baby in one arm and the camera in the other" while living with her artist husband and his family in an Italian mountain town. Multi-layered optically printed surfaces, vivid saturated colors and the voices of the American mother and Italian father are incorporated into a sensuous, personal documentary about detours, loss and rediscovery.

The work--experimental film as autobiographical essay--received the jury award at the New York Film Expo at the New School and was named best documentary film at the Media One Digital Film Festival. It also was a finalist in the Independent Film Channel 2000 competition.

Saca Una Foto was screened as part of the Harvard Archives 1994 "Wild Women: Assessing Edges in Film/Video/Performance Arts" series. The Settler is "a science-fiction story that parallels the development of the West, with the terraforming of Mars as "the next frontier."

She is currently in production on Traces and Lines, a film based on the longest city street in the world, Western Avenue, in Los Angeles and will be shooting there in January.

The filmmaker came to Oberlin this fall after serving on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego. She received a B.F.A. in filmmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. degree from the University of California at San Diego.

Her work has been shown in various film festivals and galleries around the country, including the Nashville International, Ann Arbor, and Bar Harbor film festivals, as well as at the Los Angeles Munincipal County Museum, New York’s Angelica Film Center and Women in the Directors’ Chair.