Travis Wilkerson

Wilkerson's best known film, An Injury to One (2003), was called a "political-cinema landmark" in the Los Angeles Times. The film is an experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little, an I.W.W. union leader combating injustice against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte, Montana. In 2007, Wilkerson presented the first performance art at the Sundance Film Festival: Soapbox Agitation #1: Proving Ground. The expanded cinema performance was described as "a scabrous assault on American imperialism inspired by the theoretical writings of Brecht and Lenin that featured Travis Wilkerson speechifying in between rockabilly protest songs as interpreted by "death folk" Los Angeles band Los Duggans," and "one of the only Sundance products that wasn't for sale." His narrative-documentary hybrid, Machine Gun or Typewriter? (2015), premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival. As translated from Il Manifesto, it is a "digression on the possible dissolution of life and love in a tragicomically apocalyptic Los Angeles, a delirium that ranges between the analog and the digital by very cleverly bypassing the image itself." The documentary Distinguished Flying Cross (2011) screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival In January 2017, Wilkerson presented the premiere of a new "live" documentary in the New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? The Village Voice wrote, ""It's hard not to experience Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and not get shivers up your spine - from fear, from anger, and from the beauty of Wilkerson's filmmaking." The same publication named it one of "The Ten Best Films at Sundance 2017." Writing in Artforum, Amy Taubin wrote: "this performance strategy had a powerful effect on both him and the audience. The power has to do with it being a personal story, told in the first-person; in sharing it with an audience, Wilkerson doesn’t let anyone, including himself, off the hook. 'This isn’t a white savior story. This is a white nightmare story….' one of the strongest works in a chilling Sundance Film Festival." In 2021, Wilkerson premiered the film, Nuclear Family, co-directed with Erin Wilkerson, at the Berlinale.

• Machine Gun or Typewriter? Best International Feature Dokufest (2015) • Creative Capital award (2015) • Pluto Declaration 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival's Prix de Varti Funniest Film (2012) • Distinguished Flying Cross Cinéma du réel's international Competition SCAM Prize (2011) • Distinguished Flying Cross Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival's Special Prize in International Competition (2011) • Nuclear Family (2021), Menciòn Especial at the 36th Edition of Mar del plata International Film Festival • Guggenheim Fellowship (2025) • UNDO Fellowship (2024-5)