Wilkerson's best known film,
An Injury to One (2003), was called a "political-cinema landmark" in the
Los Angeles Times. The film is an experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer
Frank Little, an
I.W.W. union leader combating injustice against the
Anaconda Copper Mining Company in
Butte, Montana. In 2007, Wilkerson presented the first performance art at the
Sundance Film Festival:
Soapbox Agitation #1: Proving Ground. The
expanded cinema performance was described as "a scabrous assault on
American imperialism inspired by the theoretical writings of Brecht and Lenin that featured Travis Wilkerson speechifying in between rockabilly protest songs as interpreted by "death folk" Los Angeles band Los Duggans," and "one of the only Sundance products that wasn't for sale." His narrative-documentary hybrid,
Machine Gun or Typewriter? (2015), premiered at the
Locarno International Film Festival. As translated from
Il Manifesto, it is a "digression on the possible dissolution of life and love in a tragicomically apocalyptic Los Angeles, a delirium that ranges between the analog and the digital by very cleverly bypassing the image itself." The documentary
Distinguished Flying Cross (2011) screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival In January 2017, Wilkerson presented the premiere of a new "live" documentary in the New Frontier section of the
Sundance Film Festival,
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? The Village Voice wrote, ""It's hard not to experience
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and not get shivers up your spine - from fear, from anger, and from the beauty of Wilkerson's filmmaking." The same publication named it one of "The Ten Best Films at Sundance 2017." Writing in
Artforum,
Amy Taubin wrote: "this performance strategy had a powerful effect on both him and the audience. The power has to do with it being a personal story, told in the first-person; in sharing it with an audience, Wilkerson doesn’t let anyone, including himself, off the hook. 'This isn’t a white savior story. This is a white nightmare story….' one of the strongest works in a chilling Sundance Film Festival." In 2021, Wilkerson premiered the film,
Nuclear Family, co-directed with
Erin Wilkerson, at the Berlinale. ==Other work==