Jay Murphy

Jay Murphy is a writer whose screenplays participated in the invitation-only 2014 Episodic Story Labs Sundance Institute competition and was a finalist in 2011 and 2006 for the Sundance Screenwriting Labs; they include Vesco, based on the bestselling book by Arthur Herzog. He has contributed to Parallax, Culture Machine, MAP, Frieze, Parkett, Contemporary, Metropolis, Art in America, World Art, Afterimage, Third Text, and other journals and was a correspondent for Contemporanea. His essays have appeared in The Progressive, In These Times, and other forums. His interactive, collaborative Internet projects have been featured in the Sundance Film Festival. He edited the book anthology For Palestine (1993), described by the The Sunday Times of London as a "powerful mixture of statistics, literature and journalism...Considered reactions to Operation Desert Storm are provocative and revealing;" poet-pundit Peter Lamborn Wilson opined that it suggested what an "ideal intifada" might look like; and his work with artist Carolee Schneemann led to her 2002 MIT Press collection. He was editor and publisher of the alternative journal Red Bass that garnered a Project Censored nomination and that Fr. Daniel Berrigan at one time claimed “redeems whatever is salvageable in Florida.” His Red Bass interviews with figures such as John Cage, William Burroughs, Emile de Antonio, Edward Said and Kathy Acker were all anthologized and republished. Among his current projects is assembling a creative nonfiction book and web project culled from different time capsules and stories from the Middle East called Baraya. In 2008 he curated gallery exhibitions in New York and Edinburgh (the latter a weekend preview selection in The Guardian); in 2009 he organised the film festival “Cruel Weather” for venues in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and in 2011 co-organised “Breaking Point” for Aberdeen and Dundee. He also curated the series “First Person” of seven filmmakers for Inverleith House and Filmhouse Cinema, Edinburgh (12 November, 2011 – 22 January, 2012) and completed his doctorate in Modern Thought at University of Aberdeen in December 2011. Recently he has contributed essays to monographs on poet/translator Clayton Eshleman (2013) and new media artist Grégory Chatonsky (2011). He organized the exhibition and film programme “Intelligence Report” that opened 3 October, 2014 at Peacock Visual Arts and Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen, and “Artaud: Projections” with The Horse Hospital, The Showroom, and Visual Cultures department, Goldsmiths College, London. His web site is found at www.thing.net/~soulcity.