Known for his collaborations with Argentine artist Luis Valdovino and filmmaker Gregory Durbin, Boord’s work is featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pacific Film Archives/Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley. La Biennale di Venezia has selected Boord’s work twice for screening at the Venice Film Festival; his work also has been broadcast on WNET (New York) and WGBH (Boston) and presented at the International Public Television Conference in Stockholm. He has been nominated twice for a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship. His work is discussed in “Termites and Rough Theatre: The Video Art of Daniel Boord” by M. Scott Phillips, appearing in the June 2024 edition of Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. While Professor Boord's moving-image work may be referred to as experimental, the adjective “experimental” describes something that evades traditional genres but that has ultimately become a genre with its own set of expectations. Boord often works at the fringes of art, ethnography, and documentary, and his creative work explores the idea that we are better prepared to welcome unfamiliarity if we suspend our predilection for the familiar. For example, his collaborative work Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (2022) does not offer a story, although it alludes to them. The product of ten years’ work in Texas, this video’s emphasis is an experience of places and their cadences, unencumbered by voice-over. The prompt for the video was Larry McMurtry’s comments about the apparent disappearance of local memory and storytelling in his hometown of Archer City, Texas.
