About

Gretchen Burger is an artist, filmmaker, curator, educator, and cultural worker deeply engaged in convenings, conversations, art projects and advocacy for practices of care and regenerative economics in public and collectively-shared spaces.

Gretchen has produced, directed and edited award-winning public television and feature documentaries and has taught traditional, experimental and immersive media and storytelling to students of all ages (Seattle Public Schools, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle University, Art Institute).

In 2016, Gretchen and Sandy Cioffi co-founded  FEARLESS, a creative agency working at the intersections of public art, public benefit R+D, old and new technologies, education, and community experience and engagement design. As director of programming, Gretchen has curated groundbreaking immersive media festivals and exhibitions, and created educational programming, public art projects and curriculum to introduce general audiences to the new language of emerging technologies and the opportunities for economic and social transformation when these tools are designed by communities for community benefit. Agency projects include: WE STREET (communities owning their own data design series), Feminizing the Machine (imagining a digital feminist ether, in collaboration with BeAnotherLab), Local Tender (new currency experiments to sustain careers in the arts, incubated at UW CoMotion Fintech Lab), SIFFX (festival exploring the public benefit uses of immersive technologies and storytelling).

Gretchen earned a certificate in documentary filmmaking from the University of Washington and a MFA in experimental film and video installation from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. More recently, she’s trained with Barcelona-based art collective BeAnotherLab in their immersive embodied storytelling methodology designed to enhanced empathetic human connection, and at the Center for Deep Listening in the Deep Listening practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. Gretchen has also studied contemporary modern dance and, for 10 years, trained as a recreational boxer. The individual and collective body — in its physicality, energy, movement, knowledge, and stories — has been central to Gretchen’s thinking and practice.

Gretchen’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at World Economic Forum-Davos, Northwest Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, Bellevue Art Museum, IMAGINE festival, Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Society of Illustrators, Star & Shadow Cinema - Newcastle, UK, Artists' Television Access, Academic Film Center - Belgrade, The Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery. Recent collaborations include All Things Fall Apart with Beth Ireland, 325 MAIN/WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE?: A Community Conversation with Sarah Cameron Sunde, and Before We Flew Like Birds We Flew Like Clouds with KT Niehoff.