The MOCA Artist Film Series, presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation, returns to the Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue on select Saturdays from May 24 through July 26, 2025. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection and centered in the cinema capital of the world, the series offers engaging and notable screenings and features artists in dialogue with fellow artists, historians, and critics.

MOCA Artist Film Series 2025 Schedule

Harmony Holiday
Abide With Me, 2024, 38 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Saturday, May 24, 2025
3pm
MOCA presents a screening of Abide With Me followed by a conversation with artist Harmony Holiday, moderated by Robin D.G. Kelley.

Abide With Me (2024) is a short film that meditates on Black artistic identity before fame through a close look at the life of Thelonious Monk. At the age of seventeen, already serious about composing and playing piano, Monk left his home in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill to tour with an evangelist. From 1934–37 he played piano accompaniment to her faith healings. No one heard from him for three years. Found video recordings layered beneath Fred Moten’s voice-over of a text written by Holiday piece together these three years in the groundbreaking musician’s life prior to becoming a signed artist. The film opens outward from collaged archival material depicting the specificities of Monk’s life in less visible spaces. Holiday intersperses other clips of renowned artists like John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Lauryn Hill, Sun Ra, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, and Azealia Banks, not only on stage, but elsewhere in moments before and between performances when personality might slip a persona’s grip—or, as Holiday’s film narrates, ”where the white gaze does not know how to look.” Her conception of the “backstage” in this work materializes with a close look of a soon-legendary Monk in a nascent space of discovery, reinstating, as Holiday explains, “the hero’s journey of the Black performer as one that is defined by unseen glories, not spectacularized ones.”

Genesis P-Orridge
S/he is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, 2024, 98 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Saturday, June 7, 2025
3pm
LOS ANGELES PREMIERE
MOCA presents a screening of S/he is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary followed by a conversation with Genesse P-Orridge, director David Charles Rodrigues, and artist Ron Athey.

Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer, and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story, never this intimate, until now. In this authorized but raw and personal documentary, award-winning director David Charles Rodrigues (Gay Chorus Deep South) documents the final year of P-Orridge’s existence as they grapple with mortality and, in the process, reveal the many sacrifices and ultimate payoffs of a life that transcended boundaries. Featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Alice Genese (Psychic TV), David J (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets), Nepalese monks, African witch doctors, and a special cameo by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, plus never-before-seen archival treasures, including performances from Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.

Sharon Hayes
Ricerche: four, 2024, 120 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Saturday, June 21, 2025
3pm
MOCA presents a screening of Ricerche:four followed by a conversation with artist Sharon Hayes and participants from the film.

Ricerche: four, 2024 is composed of interviews with three groups of LGBTQIA elders, filmed in Philadelphia, PA, Dowelltown, TN, and in Los Angeles, CA. Through joyful, illuminating, and deeply moving conversations, participants reflect on their relationships to community, family, activism, sex, sexuality, and the shifting political landscape. While not all participants identify as elders, each speaks from deep, lived experience that shapes their understanding of the social, political, and economic promises and possibilities — as well as the obstacles — facing them and their communities. These conversations make an inspired proposition for the importance of intergenerational collaboration, dialogue and care. Ricerche: four is one part of a 4-part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1964 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the US.

Billy Woodberry
And when I die, I won't stay dead, 2016, 89 min.
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue
Saturday, July 26, 2025
3pm
MOCA presents a screening of And when I die, I won't stay dead followed by a poetry reading and conversation with poet and UCLA professor, Harryette Mullen and, MOCA Senior Curator, Bennett Simpson.

Legendary Beat figure Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it's granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Embodying the spirit of those efforts, the new film from Billy Woodberry, director of the landmark Bless Their Little Hearts, is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing the man and his time.

The picture is alternately dense and fleet in its assemblage of archival footage and photos, interviews with contemporaries, and readings from the likes of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. And when I die's cumulative effect is to understand a familiar, over-exposed era with new eyes, thanks in no small part to the honest assessment provided by some of New York's Beat generation some half-century removed. Its soundtrack (with selections by the likes of Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman) hums, the participants are lively in their recollection of the man and his words, and the pace of its montage is energetic — a whirlwind procession that will leave viewers with a vivid understanding of Kaufman and his work.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.