David Gatten

David Edward Gatten (Born February 11, 1971 Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. Since 1996 Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image, cataloging the variety of ways in which texts functions in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employee cameraless techniques, combined with close-up cinematography and optical printing processes. In addition to the ongoing 16mm films, Gatten is now making hybrid 16mm/digital works and has completed an entirely digital feature-length project called The Extravagant Shadows.

His latest work, 'The Spirit Lamp', is a tribute to David Lynch co-created with actress/singer Chrystabell. It's a performance that contains songs written by Lynch and Chrystabell, accompanied by original 16mm images by David Gatten. The performance begins with three minutes of David Lynch's voice, introducing Chrystabell in the form of a love story. It started as a performance in 2025's edition of the Cannes Film Festival, and now has expanded into a series of performances, starting at 'A Gathering of the Angels' in London.

In a 2025 International Critics & Directors poll he was ranked No.8 out of over 500 artists on the list of the 50 Best Experimental Filmmakers of the 21st Century, with three of his movies included on the 50 Best Experimental Films of the Century.

Among other projects, he is currently working on a series of films entitled Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts, a project which Artforum magazine called "one of the most erudite and ambitious undertakings in recent cinema." He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to continue work on this series of films exploring the library of William Byrd II of Westover (1674–1744) and the lives of William Byrd and his daughter Evelyn Byrd (1707–1737).

In November 2011 Texts of Light: A Mid-Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films by David Gatten, curated by Chris Stults, opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The three program retrospective screened in 2012 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Harvard Film Archive; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues in San Francesco; and at REDCAT, The LA Film Forum, and The Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles.

One of his most celebrated works, The Extravagant Shadows, is a 175-minute work of high-definition digital cinema. It premiered at Lincoln Center in the 2012 edition of the New York Film Festival. The Extravagant Shadows was named one of the "Top 10 Undistributed Movies of 2012" by a Film Comment international film critics poll magazine.

His work has also been part of retrospectives at the 2015 edition of the PLASTIK Festival in Dublin, as well as at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, back in 2017.