Isaac Julien CBE RA is a Turner prize nominated artist and filmmaker. Julien creates multi-screen film installations and photographs that incorporate different artistic disciplines to create a poetic and unique visual language. Born in 1960 in London, he is one of the most prominent figures at the intersection of media art and cinema today. While studying painting and fine art film at St Martin's School of Art from which he graduated in 1984, Isaac Julien cofounded 'Sankofa Film and Video Collective' in which he was active from 1983-1992.
Julien’s debut film Looking for Langston garnered the artist a cult following. The acclaimed 1989 documentary-drama, explores author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. Earlier works include Young Soul Rebels (1991), which was awarded the Semaine de la Critique Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His 1996 film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask has been newly conserved and restored by the British Film Institute and was re-launched in a Blu-ray version in 2017.
Julien has pioneered a form of multi-screen installations with works such as Western Union: Small Boats (2007), which won the Charles Wollatson Award in 2017, Ten Thousand Waves (2010) and Playtime (2014).
Julien’s work is included in the collections of institutions around the globe, such as Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town and Towner Art Gallery Collection, Eastbourne, UK. In 2013, a monographic survey of his career to date, Riot, was published by MoMA, NY.