FLASH: Dave Eggers is Your Poster Artist

Per this release from the Telluride Film Festival Press Office:

TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL SELECTS DAVE EGGERS

AS ITS 2012 FESTIVAL POSTER ARTIST

July 9, 2012

BERKELEY, CA – Telluride Film Festival (August 31 – September 3, 2012), presented by National Film Preserve LTD., proudly announces it has selected American writer, editor, publisher and philanthropist Dave Eggers as its 39th Telluride Film Festival poster artist.

Eggers will attend the 39^th Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend to present his poster design to the public and hold a poster signing for festival guests. A special reception will also be held to honor Eggers, sponsored by the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television.

Dave Eggers began working as a freelance graphic designer out of college and then moved in to writing and editing at Salon.com. He founded Mightmagazine while also writing a comic strip for SF Weekly. He is the best-selling author of numerous books including his first work, a lightly fictionalized memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a national bestseller and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) was Eggers’ first published novel; an expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003. What is the What was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici. In 2009, the Council on American-Islamic Relations presented Eggers with the “Courage In Media” Award for his book Zeitoun. Film director Jonathan Demme has optioned the book, which has also won the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Eggers co-wrote two screenplays in 2009: Away We Go and Where The Wild Things Are. His latest novel, A Hologram for the King, was released in 2012 to critical acclaim.

Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco built to help emerging and underappreciated writers find their voice. The publishing house produces a daily humor website and publishes Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Lucky Peach, Wholphin, Grantland Quarterly, and a growing selection of books under various imprints.

In 2002 Eggers co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. The program offers free tutoring, English as a Second Language classes, writing workshops, summer camps, publications projects and other services to kids ages six to 18. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston and Washington, DC.

A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

"Dave is well-known for his terrific literary works, but most people don’t know he was trained as a painter, and when he was starting out as a writer, he worked as an illustrator and graphic designer. The fact that he is a gifted visual artist is a bit of a secret we want to share with the world,” comments Julie Huntsinger, Telluride Film Festival co-director. “Dave is talented, big-hearted, smart and remarkably well-rounded. We’re overjoyed to have him join the Telluride Film Festival community as our poster artist this year. Our audiences will be delighted with the fresh take he has created for the artwork of TFF 39.

“I was thrilled to be asked to do the poster for this year’s Telluride Film Festival,” said Dave Eggers. “I decided to make the poster look a bit like the national parks posters from back in the day, and to go with a light, almost washed-out palette. That’s how I think of Colorado in the summer: sun-drenched and with incredible color combinations. From there, it just seemed appropriate to have a bear filming an elk.”

Dave Eggers joins a prestigious list of artists who have shared their talents with the Telluride Film Festival. Past poster artists include Ed Ruscha, John Mansfield, Julian Schnabel, Dottie Attie, Doug and Mike Starn, David Lance Goines, Chuck Jones, David Salle, Alexis Smith, Jim Dine, Seymour Chwast, Frederic Amat, Francesco Clemente, Dave McKean, Gary Larson, Chip Kidd, John Canemaker, Mark Stock, Laurie Anderson, William Wegman, Ralph Eggleston and Maira Kalman.

For more information and a complete list of Eggers work and accomplishments, visit: www.mcsweeneys.net

To download the 39th Telluride Film Festival poster art, visit: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9291181/TFF%2039%202012%20poster.pdf.zip

39th Telluride Film Festival posters will be available for purchase throughout the four-day Festival or by visiting the TFF website atwww.telluridefilmfestival.org.

39^th Telluride Film Festival passes are now available at www.telluridefilmfestival.org.

40^th Anniversary of the Telluride Film Festival

Next year Telluride Film Festival will be celebrating its 40^th Anniversary, scheduled for August 29 – September 2, 2013.  To commemorate this special occasion an additional day has been added to the usual four-day Festival, making room for a five-day bounty of special programming and festivities. Passes will be available for purchase beginning in March 2013.  

More tomorrow about what this choice might ALSO mean...

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