About
The mixed-race daughter of a black jazz musician father and white self-taught artist mother, Aarin Burch's earliest memories are from the epicenter of the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. She spent her formative years immersed in the city’s multi-faceted creative communities, including the Fillmore, Chinatown, and the Castro, before moving across the Bay to Oakland to build her own.
An innovator in queer cinema, Aarin earned her B.F.A in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1991, studying under filmmakers Lynn Kirby, Barbara Hammer, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Marlon Riggs. Aarin’s work explores the multiplicities and intersections of race, sexuality, and identity and her first films, Dreams of Passion (1989) and Spin Cycle (1990), screened widely, alongside works by Riggs, Cheryl Dunye and Isaac Julien, among others.
Aarin’s extensive career as a director and producer has included collaborations with several musicians. She produced and directed films for Olivia Travel for nearly three decades and served as production manager for Pratibha Parmar’s documentary A Place of Rage, featuring Angela Davis and June Jordan—both of whom were also her mentors—and Warrior Marks, featuring Alice Walker. She has served on the board of Frameline and has participated in screening committees for the Mill Valley Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Frameline and is currently on the committee for the International Queer Women of Color Film Festival.
Since 2023, renewed interest in Aarin’s contributions to experimental film have led to several screenings and discussions of her early work at festivals, museums, and universities across the U.S. and internationally. These events, including the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts and Berlin’s Feminist Elsewheres, have helped to situate Aarin’s work within current conversations on queer and Black feminist cinema, and Aarin has since delivered guest lectures on her work at institutions including NYU, Rice University and Dartmouth College.
Aarin is currently working on a short film that picks up from Spin Cycle, and she has two feature-length hybrid documentaries in development. The first interrogates her complex relationship with her mother, the designer, entrepreneur, and artist Laurel Burch, while the second is about the role of legendary Club Q in the history of queer nightlife in San Francisco. Her work has been supported by the Berkeley Film Foundation and Sisters in Cinema.
Dreams of Passion and Spin Cycle are currently being preserved and digitized by the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, ensuring their continued accessibility and underscoring their lasting significance for scholars and curators, as well as their ongoing resonance among new audiences.
Alongside her filmmaking, Aarin is a 7th Degree Black Belt and Assistant Head Instructor at Hand to Hand Kajukenbo Martial Arts.