Kelman Duran is an artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Los Angeles who is interested in the way disenfranchised communities respond to civic architecture and mechanisms of surveillance. Duran received a BA in Sociology from The State University of New York at Binghamton and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Previous exhibitions and screenings include Project Row Houses, Houston; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; and Harvard University, Cambridge, among others. Duran has received grants from the Graham Foundation for the Arts, Chicago; The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission among others.

Duran’s film to the north II (2017) is a collaboration with artist LeRoy Janis that explores life on the Oglala Lakota Native American Reservation, Pine Ridge, located in South Dakota in the United States. The film is a structurally dialectical envisioning (equal parts historical documentary, narrative, and missive) of the stark landscape of the Black Hills as a place in which transcendent, deeply spiritual experiences are commonplace in spite of its violent history of dispossession.