Denver Month of Video 2025 Lights Up the City with Moving Art

Video is everywhere — in our pockets, on our feeds and all throughout our daily lives. Still, in the art world, it’s often treated like a newcomer instead of the deeply established, shape-shifting medium it’s become.

"We really love the medium of video art, but there's never a place where we can count on seeing video in Denver," says Jenna Maurice, a video artist and co-founder of Denver Month of Video. "You can see a painting any damn day. You can see a sculpture anytime. You can see photography most of the time, but somehow video is still considered new media, and it's just not very regularly shown. It's getting better, but it's still kind of an outlier, which is weird."

That outsider status is exactly what Denver MOV aims to change. After debuting in 2023, the free, citywide festival returns this month with a sprawling lineup of more than seventy artists working across formats. From documentaries to live performances to a video game arcade, installations will appear everywhere from downtown LED billboards to alternative art spaces, with a jam-packed schedule of screenings, live events and public art activations all July.
While the official opening night celebration, Scene Report, takes place on July 5 at the Sie Film Center, the festival quietly launches Tuesday, July 1 with two city-spanning exhibitions: Video Art on Downtown LED Screens, presented in collaboration with the Denver Theatre District, and Night Lights Denver at the D&F Clock Tower. Both programs, curated by Maurice and fellow co-founder Adán De La Garza, will play on a loop throughout the month. The LED screens can be viewed daily from 7 a.m. to midnight, while the Clock Tower projections light up the city every night from 9 p.m. to midnight.

“That early programming is our way of embedding video art directly into people’s daily lives,” says De La Garza, who has spent over a decade organizing screenings and exhibitions in Denver. “You don’t have to go to a gallery. You might just catch something walking home from dinner downtown.”

De La Garza, a longtime fixture in the city's experimental media scene, runs the underground video screening series Collective Misnomer and is a member of the artist collective Dizzy Spell, which explores the intersection of art and gaming. His background programming in nontraditional spaces laid the groundwork for MOV’s eclectic structure.

"The point is to have a lot of different entry points for participants and the community to experience something that might be new to them or that they're already really familiar with and just maybe don't see that often," De La Garza says. "Our main goal is to provide access to video art for not only the artists here who create time-based art on a regular basis, but also for others who may have an investment in it, are fans of that type of work, or have never seen it before."
That wide scope is reflected in the festival’s month-long schedule. In addition to more traditional gallery shows, like Moving Still: Video Art Highlights from the Dikeou Collection and Under Pressure at Friend of a Friend, MOV features a video game collection that comments on the art world, a documentary screening, a live music performance with VJ projections and several collaborative events with artist-run spaces. “We think about this like a curatorial platform,” Maurice says. “There are some spaces that Adán and I curate directly, like the big RedLine show, but in other spaces, we step back and see what other people are feeling about video. We want MOV to reflect a range of tastes and perspectives.”

That RedLine Contemporary Art Center exhibition, Mutual Terrain, opens July 11 and brings together six international artists exploring spiritual, political and personal connections to land through video. The show highlights one of the festival’s core themes: that video is a medium capable of holding multiple ideas at once and delivering them in real time.

“Both of us are really excited about the RedLine show,” Maurice says. “It’s one of those projects where we get to transform a space we know well into something entirely different. I was a resident artist there for two years during the first MOV, so getting to come back with this kind of vision feels really full circle.”
For De La Garza, the video game exhibition that Dizzy Spell has been working on, Free Hors d'oeuvres, feels particularly special.

"This year is all about video games for different art experiences," he explains. "One of my favorites is this guy who converted the old Doom game from the 1990s into a gallery experience, where you go around collecting hors d'oeuvres, wine and cheese, so you're in this weird, brutalist-looking space looking at artwork. It tells you information about it, then you'll get some cheese and you can exit through the gift shop. There are all these goofy experiences we created that I'm excited to share with people."

And for those interested in live art, the July 26 closing night event, Eclectic Systems at Rainbow Dome, offers video as performance. It's a combination of projection, improvisation, music and motion that pushes the boundaries of screen-based work.

“Live video is something we don’t always think of as an art form, but it absolutely is,” Maurice says. “It’s so physical and present, and it pulls you in differently than a static screen. It’s exciting to give that type of work a platform. Eclectic Systems will incorporate live video manipulation, music and sound to experience video in a more participatory way."
Behind the scenes, MOV is fueled by a clear philosophy: community first. Maurice and De La Garza, who met in grad school at CU Boulder, built the festival not just as artists, but as collaborators and friends. Their curatorial approach prioritizes relationships and creating a supportive environment for artists to thrive.

"On a local level, I'm going to support the work that I like, obviously, but I also want to know that these people are active in the community in some capacity," De La Garza says. "I worry that makes it sound like we're gatekeeping or something, but I want people to know they can and should approach us. We program this in part by attending other people's events to determine who is consistently contributing to the community. Our goal is to help foster a culture that supports artists, not only monetarily but also culturally, so people can continue to create here in Denver."

The 2025 festival is backed by two grants and built around a tightly managed budget. Maurice and De La Garza work collaboratively with presenting venues to stretch their resources. Organizations that already have budgets for programming are asked to fold MOV into their existing plans, while DIY spaces and artist-run curators receive direct support from MOV’s pool to ensure all artists and labor are fairly compensated.

Looking ahead, the co-founders aren’t necessarily imagining something bigger, just something that stays meaningful.
“I think every festival will be a little bit different just because it's not going to be in the same venues every time,” Maurice says. “We've got some new ones this year and some we had last time, but we don’t have some master vision to scale up. We had a pretty good plan last time and we came out of the gate with a bang, so we're now doing it again and plan to keep doing this every other year."

And Maurice and De La Garza are already thinking about what's next — not in terms of growth, but of community.

“You might be noticing a theme here,” Maurice says with a laugh. “We love friends, we love making things happen, we love sustainability, we love video art and we love it when artists get paid. Those things are really what this festival is about."

Denver Month of Video is at various venues in Denver throughout July. Free. Learn more at denvermov.com.