The Park in front Cynthia Woods Mitchell Building, University of Houston, Entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd
(Rain Location: Dudley Recital Hall, School of Art, University of Houston, Entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd)
Free Admission
Parking available in Lot 16
In a special collaboration between the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, and the Aurora Picture Show, Aurora will present an outdoor screening of Michael Gitlin’s The Birdpeople (16mm, 61 minutes) in the University of Houston park outside the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Building, Entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd. The screening is in conjunction with the Blaffer Gallery’s exhibit of work by photographer Jean Luc Mylayne (September 8 – November 10).

A loosely-knit community of birdwatchers in New York's Central Park; ornithologists with their specimen collections at a dozen different natural history museums; bird banders gingerly extracting birds from mist nets and collecting data in upstate New York; six people searching for an extinct bird in a Louisiana bayou: these are the strands that are woven together by Gitlin’s The Birdpeople, as it documents a passionate fixation. Part cultural history, part self-reflexive anthropology, by turns humorous and elegiac, The Birdpeople examines the pleasures and problems of looking and naming, and investigates the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart, birdwatching.

Michael Gitlin's work has been screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and the 1997 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.