Teaching Award
I’ve been teaching at Colorado State University for over 7 years and I’m so honored to be receiving this award.
The 14’er Award: This award recognized innovative achievements demonstrating unique vision, creativity and grit.

I’ve been teaching at Colorado State University for over 7 years and I’m so honored to be receiving this award.
The 14’er Award: This award recognized innovative achievements demonstrating unique vision, creativity and grit.
My first film for this year is titled Soon.
I was thinking about Super 8mm film and my own childhood and all these home movies my father shot and then transferred to a variety of video tapes and systems, and how those moving images mutate and glitch into its own form. The transformation is part of it, the memory, the pain and the history manifesting visually.
I was also thinking about living through war and how trauma is not something you have to suffer through alone, other people who have gone through difficult times can connect to this.
I … Read the rest
A selection of recent short films and older films.
Click here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/1622863
These are selections from my art-journals from 1988 -1989 when I was 18 years old.
I was a romantic weird guy, trying to figure out my life by working out my stuff in drawings and words. 30 years later I decided to publish this embarrassing work as a peak into my headspace as a young man. I think of this as a type of time-machine that can fuse my past and present into something new.
This is a hardcover zine (11 X 8.5 inches) with 80 sides and 40 pages.
Purchase Boy from War
Filmmaker Usama Alshaibi came to the United States from Iraq as a child. To him, being American means being proud of who you are and where you came from in the face of overwhelming resistance.
(Ivy Winfrey reports for Next Generation Radio with Colorado Public Radio)
Carey Burtt and I talk about film, life and death.
I edited a new trailer for my 2002 first feature film Soak. My friend Tom had never performed in a film before but he wanted to help me. I always prefer to work with non-professionals actors, or people that have never acted before. It helps that my film crew is so tiny—in this film it was mostly me and the camera and the performer— that it allows for a certain tone to blossom. No deadline, no money, no worry. We were free.
It had only one public screening as a world premiere at the 2002 Chicago Underground Film Festival.… Read the rest
There is a moment on every journey when it becomes impossible to quantify how much farther we have to go. The challenge comes in recognizing the amorphousness of expectations and the malleability of experience. What was before simply is no longer. Time moves ahead, often without explanation.
Curated by Megan Young at SPACES
More info: https://www.spacescle.org/exhibitions/2021/04/16/coming-suddenly-passing-strangely
Today marks the anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq. Watch our film for free about my return to my homeland to make my first documentary.
Our film The Desire premieres virtually in Paris at the Demetera International Film Festival. If you want to watch please go to their YouTube page where it will screen March 10 at 8pm Paris time
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9uH-q9NkxMgL91i31QteRg