Frame of Mind

Suzanne Dooley and Marlis Schmidt each approached KERA in 1991 with proposals for a series on local independent filmmakers, and Frame of Mind was the result; the multi-episode series began airing in 1992. Schmidt, who had worked in video art since college in Denton, chose Scott Murphy's Extra Credit Project as the first piece because it represented the independent filmmaker. Early episodes also showed Keith Alcorn's 1991 series Nana and Lil' PussPuss, a decade before his Oscar nomination for Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. When both founders moved away, Bart Weiss took over in 1995. Weiss had worked at KERA and co-founded the Dallas VideoFest and the Video Association of Dallas, which co-produces the show.

For years the program aired irregularly. In 2014 KERA's arts desk, Art&Seek, joined as co-producer and turned it into a 13-episode season that premiered on September 4 with a watch party at the Texas Theatre. That season drew from SXSW, the Dallas VideoFest, the Dallas International Film Festival, Women In Film Dallas's Chick Flicks program and students at the University of Texas at Arlington. One episode surveyed the early shorts of Dallas filmmaker David Lowery, including Pioneer, and another collected Kat Candler's Austin shorts. Others featured Greenhill School student films, the Dallas 24 Hour Video Race and SXSW Texas Shorts selections such as Daniel Laabs's Easy.

A 12-episode retrospective marked the 25th anniversary in 2017. The 28th season, in 2020, opened with journalist Bob Ray Sanders on how Dallas-Fort Worth media covered race. In 2022, its 30th season, KERA offered the series to PBS stations across Texas for the first time, and in 2023 the 31st season also became the first to stream online.