Kelman Duran

Bio

Kelman Duran is a Dominican-American musician, visual artist, filmmaker, and scholar from Los Angeles. Born and raised in New York City, Duran graduated from LaGuardia and moved to South Korea before studying at CalArts. As a DJ and producer, he is mostly affiliated with LA’s Rail Up crew and Riobamba’s Apocalipsis label, who also recently put out his album, 13th Month. The creation of the record was inspired by indigenous moon cycles that Duran learned about while living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he shot a documentary titled To the North. While he sees his music as a purely emotional counterpart to his visual arts and film work, his artistic and scholarly interests focus on issues of racism, police brutality, and the interplay between disenfranchised groups and civil architecture.