Meet IDA’S Visiting Artist: Adrian L. Burrell

Adrian Burrell outside of Vallejo City Hall. (Pendarvis Harshaw/KQED)

This year the Institute for Diversity in the Arts welcomes interdisciplinary artist Adrian L. Burrell as our 2022 IDA Visiting Artist.

Adrian is a storyteller from Oakland, California. He studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute where he received a BFA and he holds an MFA in documentary film from Stanford University. This winter, Adrian is teaching a course for undergraduates through Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and African and African American Studies called Still Waters Run Deep, Troubling The Archive with filmmaking and photography. In this course, students create individual projects that explore their own family, community, environmental histories, and narratives.

As an IDA visiting artist, Adrian also is working on new projects in filmmaking including his first feature-length script, Cousins.


Adrian L. Burrell, Regeneration (featuring a mural by Twin Walls Mural Company), from the series It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?, 2020; © Adrian L. Burrell

adrian’s photography series It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?, 2020 was commissioned and exhibited by SFMOMA and his most recent short film, “The Game God(S),” was recently featured in the New Yorker.

Game God(s), directed by Adrian Burrell, tells the multigenerational story of a society that deprives Black Americans of success.