John Warren

Senior Lecturer of Art

John Warren is a film and video artist, educator, and Nashville native whose work spans 16mm film, digital video, and expanded cinema installation. Blending documentary, experimental, and narrative approaches, his films explore the intersection of place, memory, and perception, investigating how images hold time and how history haunts the present.

As a senior lecturer in Vanderbilt's Department of Art, Warren teaches Video Art, Animation, and City on Screen: Documenting Place, Power, and Justice in Nashville. His forty-plus films and installations have exhibited internationally at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Frist Art Museum, and at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival, Slamdance, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. His work was included in the 2023 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art and in an exhibition presented as part of the 61st Biennale di Venezia.

Current research includes a fulldome film on Nashville-born astronomer E.E. Barnard for the Sudekum Planetarium; Nashville's Mirror, a documentary using John Seigenthaler's career as a lens for examining how Nashville has told its own story; and Over Head: The Illuminated History of the Psychedelic Light Show, a feature documentary tracing the liquid light show from 1950s San Francisco through its global influence on counterculture and immersive art.