Henry Guzmán Mitchell — painting, drawing & film
Henry Guzmán Mitchell · New York
See the workRead bio
Artwork
Ten works · painting & drawingPortraits
Plein air
Graphite drawings
Film
Short film · 2020
Butterflies
A coming-of-age film I made in high school. I wrote it, shot it, and edited it in 2020, casting friends and family in the lead roles.
▶ Watch the filmSeries · Stop-motion
The Nokia Films
Three stop-motion shorts built frame by frame from stills shot on a Nokia 2760 — the whole series made inside the limits of a phone camera.
Writing
Honors thesis · UC Berkeley
"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" and Cultural Memory
The Portable Monument and Its Afterlives
My undergraduate honors thesis in Comparative Literature, reading Giorgio Bassani's novel as a "portable monument" — a text that holds the memory of Ferrara's Jewish community, and remakes itself through each adaptation, translation, and reader.
Read the thesis (PDF)
About Henry Guzmán Mitchell
Henry Guzmán Mitchell is a filmmaker, painter, and writer based in New York. He grew up in Brooklyn and studied Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where he completed an honors thesis on cultural memory and monuments in the work of Giorgio Bassani.
The work here is made from life: a model in the studio, a boat at its mooring, the hand of Michelangelo's David. He paints thin and fast and leaves parts of the canvas visible under the color. The debts are to Velázquez, Sargent, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Alongside painting, he makes experimental films, and is at work on a documentary about the Jewish community of Rhodes, built from years of oral history and archival research. He has conducted interviews with Stella Levi and is working closely with Barry Salzman to bring these oral histories to life.