Autotheory and the Poetics of the Self: Storying the Personal with Arielle Knight
Thursday, April 15, 6:30–8:30 pm
Free or $10 suggested donation; open to ages 16+.
Limited seats available; register below
Join Squeaky Wheel and visiting artist resident Arielle Knight for a short form writing workshop! This skill share invites participants to experiment with autobiographical storytelling and the practice of autotheory—the blending of lived experience and critical thought—to create new forms of narrative that collapse the boundaries between personal and intellectual inquiry. Drawing from practices in experimental film, performance, and essay-making, this session will guide participants in transforming fragments of memory, personal archives, and embodied experiences into generative creative material.
Participants will engage in short writing and reflection exercises that explore how personal narrative can serve as both evidence and theory, as well as how storytelling becomes a method for survival, healing, and critique. Examples of artists and thinkers who employ autotheory to reframe vulnerability as a tool for intervention will be presented, including excerpts from texts by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Maggie Nelson.
Through group discussion and individual exercises, participants will learn strategies for translating autobiographical material into multiple media forms—moving image, sound, installation, and text—and discuss the ethics of working with one’s own story and the stories of others. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have developed a short creative concept or fragment that reflects their own approach to merging self-experience and theory in creative practice.
The filmmakers presents this skill-share as an offering; centering on creating a supportive and exploratory environment, where storytelling becomes a form of research and resistance, allowing each participant to reimagine how the personal can illuminate the collective and the political.
Attendees: Notebooks and pens for the workshop will be provided, though participants are welcome to bring their own. We’ll be ordering a pizza for everyone. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main center after 7:30 pm.
Funding for this session of Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is provided by the Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thank you to our friends at Rust Belt Books, Buffalo’s largest used bookstore, for sponsoring this session of the residency. Special thank you to the panelists of this session of the residency, Alicia Hawkins, Donte McFadden, and Joan Nobile. Learn more about the program here.
Biography of the artist
Director and producer Arielle Knight is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of GoodKnight Films Inc., acclaimed for her innovative storytelling that illuminates untold narratives across the Black diaspora. Working at the intersection of documentary and hybrid forms, her films and collaborations examine how communities navigate social, economic, and embodied precarity. She draws on surreal interpretations of political, social, and domestic realities, blurring boundaries between nonfiction and fantasy to create cinematic spaces of escape and freedom. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Southern Documentary Fund, Catapult Film Fund, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Through intimate, personal narratives, Knight continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary cinema with a vision rooted in Black futurity, imagination, and experimentation.
