At the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (October 22-25, 2025), Aarin presented on presence as a strategy for world-making, drawing from her archival film work and a multifaceted creative inheritance. Through clips from her films, she explored how attention, embodiment, and ritual become repeatable gestures of resilience that enable creative futures to emerge.

At the invitation of Rice University’s Department of Art History, Aarin presented her work and discussed her views on presence as a strategy for creative world-making. Showing clips from her films, and new work in progress, she explored the importance of coming back to the work, and how showing up, creatively and courageously, becomes a way to heal, connect, and make new meaning.

Screening of Spin Cycle, sponsored by NYU Cinema Studies. The symposium highlighted “orphan” films, or works with uncertain preservation status, bringing renewed visibility to Aarin’s early experimental practice. Since this event, the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago has begun preserving two of Aarin’s early works.

Program of seven of Aarin’s works, screened in both 16mm and digital formats, followed by a live Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by Tisa Bryant. Presented as part of the Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness series, the event showcased the breadth of Aarin’s early projects and her current reemergence.

Screening and conversation featuring four works, including Dreams of Passion and Spin Cycle. Presented as part of a retrospective-style evening situating Aarin’s films within broader dialogues on queer cinema.

Panel conversation featuring Aarin alongside Michelle Parkerson and Sophia Nahli Allison, reflecting on capturing nuanced experiences as Black queer women’s filmmaking practices. Aarin contributed her perspective on legacy, identity, and experimental film form.

Feminist Elsewheres draws on events that took place at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin, considered the starting point of the feminist film movement in West Germany. Aarin participated in a screening and panel discussion of experimental feminist film, sharing her work with an international audience in dialogue with other artists and scholars.

Screening of ten works by Black women experimental filmmakers, from the 1980s to today, organized in collaboration with Sisters in Cinema. The program featured works by Aarin Burch, Zeinabu irene Davis, Cheryl Dunye, Jada-Amina, S. Pearl Sharp, and many others, and highlighted questions of identity, intimacy, and representation across generations.

Inspired by the groundbreaking and interdisciplinary 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, this symposium revisited groundbreaking works by Black feminist artists. It included a screening program, workshops, and roundtable conversations that reflected on the past and future of Black women’s filmmaking. Aarin’s films featured alongside intergenerational peers in the Interior Lives program and she participated as a panelist.