About

Aarin Burch is an experimental filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes of identity and belonging. In the last few years, she has experienced a powerful resurgence of interest in her groundbreaking contributions to queer and Black feminist cinema—with screenings at festivals, museums, and universities across the U.S. and internationally, including the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts and Berlin's Feminist Elsewheres. She has delivered guest lectures at NYU, Rice University, and Dartmouth College, and two of her early films, Dreams of Passion and Spin Cycle, are currently being preserved by the University of Chicago's Film Studies Center.

  • Aarin is currently working on a short film that continues from Spin Cycle, an early short that screened worldwide. She has two feature-length hybrid documentaries in development—one exploring her complex relationship with her mother, designer and artist Laurel Burch, and another documenting the legendary Club Q's role in San Francisco's queer nightlife history. What drives her return to experimental filmmaking now is the urgency of this moment. As a Black queer creator and elder in an increasingly challenging climate, she brings decades of perspective on community, resilience and creative legacy to her conversations with practitioners and audiences across geographies and generations.

    An early innovator in queer cinema, Aarin earned her B.F.A. in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1991, studying under Lynn Kirby, Barbara Hammer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Marlon Riggs. Her first films screened widely alongside works by Riggs, Cheryl Dunye, and Isaac Julien. She served as production manager for Pratibha Parmar's documentaries A Place of Rage, featuring her mentors Angela Davis and June Jordan, and Warrior Marks, featuring Alice Walker.

    Following this early work, Aarin spent over three decades honing her craft in commercial filmmaking as an independent filmmaker, including as a director and producer for Olivia Travel.  After this, she shifted her focus to running her mother's art business. All these experiences deepened her understanding of both the commercial and entrepreneurial sides of creative work. 

    Aarin has served on the board of Frameline, participated in screening committees for major film festivals, and currently serves on the advisory board for the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. Her work has been supported by the Berkeley Film Foundation and Sisters in Cinema.

    The mixed-race daughter of a Black jazz musician father and white self-taught artist mother, Aarin's earliest memories are from the Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. She spent her formative years immersed in the city's creative communities—the Fillmore, Chinatown, and the Castro—before moving to Oakland to build her own.

    Alongside her filmmaking, Aarin has been a hip-hop dance instructor and is a 7th Degree Black Belt and Assistant Head Instructor at Hand to Hand Kajukenbo Martial Arts.