Biography
Bryan Wizemann is an award winning filmmaker and visual artist. He attended Hunter’s MFA program for conceptual art, before he found someone to go in his place. His work has been exhibited extensively and is part of several collections.

His short film work includes Button Soup (Johnson Museum, Cinema Village NY), The Morning Sun (Rooftop Films, IFC), the television pilot Cooklyn, and Film Makes Us Happy, which documents the last fight he will ever have with his wife about making films (Hamptons, IFF Boston, Rooftop Films, DocPoint, Wholphin).

His feature film Losing Ground (Cinequest, CineVegas, Santa Fe) was adapted from his critically acclaimed New York stage play and features the original cast. It was called “fascinating filmmaking that gets to the core of humanity” by Film Threat and is available from Netflix. His film Think of Me, featuring Lauren Ambrose, Audrey Scott, Dylan Baker, and Penelope Ann Miller, premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival where Rex Reed called it a “wrenching but admirably unsentimental film about the bravery of the human condition.” Humor Me, a romantic comedy written with Andrew Semans, was recently optioned out of the IFP Independent Film Week and is currently in development. Bryan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Artist's Statement
So my wife has this joke. It’s from Bosnia, and the jokes over there are often at the expense of their countrymen, but I think this one is special. So this guy is walking a pair of dogs and he runs into a friend on the street. The friend says wow, these dogs are so fit, so well defined, you must really give them some good exercise. And the owner says yeah, I run the dog on the right every day. And the friend says what about the dog on the left, and the owner says oh I run him too. And the friend starts to pet them and says their coats are so shiny and healthy, you must feed them a good diet, and the owner says well I feed the one on the right a healthy diet. And the friend says what about the dog on the left, and the owner says yeah, I feed him a healthy diet too. And the friend tells the dogs to sit and they do and he says Christ they’re so well trained you must spend a lot of time with them. And the owner says I spend a lot of time training the dog on the right. And the friend says what about the dog on the left, and the owner says yeah, I train him a lot too. And so finally the friend says why don’t you just tell me you run both dogs and feed them both the same thing and that they’re both well trained instead of wasting my god damn time here. And the owner says well the dog on the right is my dog. And the friend says well, what about the dog on the left, and the owner says he’s my dog too.

This is sort of what my art is like.

My motivations for creating art, at least in the broad sense, have always been and continue to be somewhat naïve. These reasons being to give people pause, to slow time, to make someone laugh, to elicit a kind of transcendence with the crap we are given, to remind one what it is to be human, to use one’s own experiences to do so. There are many strategies I've found myself using to lure one in: humor, personal risk, confession, subversion, visual seduction. I try to be as dark as possible, and further try to subvert that, by appealing to an absolute sincerity, always hopefully folding in on itself. Most art I admire seems to have an inherent quality of acknowledging that all art, and especially the offered work, is a complete and total hoax that offers no help or truths or answers of any kind. It accepts the lack of truth and objectivity and meaning and then starts to slowly crawl back up. I aspire to that. So I've found that my work is generally naked, simple, exposed, and works to disarm and seduce the viewer for a bit longer than the five or six seconds normally dedicated to visual consumption.

Filmography
Think of Me
HD, color, 103min. Writing | Direction
-Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best Female Lead, Lauren Ambrose
-US Premiere Hamptons International Film Festival 2011
-World Premiere Toronto International Film Festival 2011
-Top three winners, Slamdance Feature Screenplay Competition 2007

Film Makes Us Happy
HD, color, 12min. Direction | Editing | Sound
-DocPoint International Film Festival, Helsinki 2010
-Featured film on the Wholphin DVD website 2009
-International Film Festival of Boston, Boston, MA 2008
-Rooftop Films, Best of Summer Shorts, Brooklyn NY August 2008
-Hamptons International Film Festival, East Hampton, NY 2007
-80 Minutes of Shorts, New York NY 2007

Cooklyn
HD, color, 22min. Conception | Direction
-Television pilot, Brooklyn NY 2006

The Morning Sun
HD, color, 5min. Writing | Direction
-Rooftop Films, Brooklyn NY August 2007
-Independent Film Channel, Fall 2006
-Winner IFC Media Lab Best of July 2006

Losing Ground
DVCam, color, 90min. Writing | Production | Direction
-Santa Fe Film Festival, Santa Fe, NM 2005
-CineVegas Film Festival, Las Vegas, NV 2005
-Cinequest Film Festival, San Jose, CA 2005

Sense
16mm, color, 85min. Writing | Direction | Editing
-IFFM, Angelika Film Center, New York, NY 1998
-Cornell Cinema, Willard Straight Theatre, Ithaca, NY 1997

The Beast
HD, color, 5min. Conception | Direction
-Music Video for Laura Minor

Button Soup
16mm, b&w sepia, 14min. Writing | Direction | Editing
-Cinema Village Theater, New York City, NY 1996
-Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY 1996

Authorship
The Weakest Fish
Feature Screenplay
The Odyssey
Feature Screenplay
Humor Me
Feature Screenplay
(with Andrew Semans)
Think of Me
Feature Screenplay
The Morning Sun
Short Screenplay
Losing Ground
Stage Play & Feature Film Adaptation
Sense
Feature Screenplay
Button Soup
Short Screenplay
Daylight
Feature Radio Play
Genuine Bricks
Feature Screenplay