ABOUT

Colleen Thurston is a filmmaker, educator and film curator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has created film and video work for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, public television, museums, and federal and tribal organizations. Grounding her filmmaking practice in place-based narratives and Indigenous world views, her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide.

Colleen has been supported by Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, the Ford Foundation, the Redford Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Creative Capital. Colleen’s first feature documentary DROWNED LAND (2025) examines the cycle of displacement as it is related to resource extraction in her tribe, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Drowned Land is slated for PBS broadcast in 2026.

With two decades experience in the film festival world, Colleen is a​ programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, MountainFilm and Tacoma Film Festival and is on the board of directors and the programming team for the Indian Territory Film Festival​. Colleen has curated film programs for institutions such as the Momentary (Bentonville, AR), the Smithsonian’s Native Cinema Showcase (Santa Fe, NM), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), UCLA Film and Television Archives and Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA) and numerous film festivals. She is the project producer for the Indigenous video series, Native Lens on Rocky Mountain PBS.

Deeply committed to the next generation of filmmakers, Colleen has held positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas and the University of Oklahoma, teaching documentary production and film studies. She is the founder of the upcoming Indigenous Moving Image Archive and Home Movie Project, and co-creator of Kinship Frame, an intersectional film curatorial project hosted at Dreamland Tulsa.