Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. Her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
George Kuchar was an American underground film director and video artist, known for his "low-fi" aesthetic.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Jem Alan Cohen is an Afghan-born American filmmaker based in New York City. Cohen is especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats and collaborations with musicians. He also makes multichannel installations and still photographs and had a photography show at Robert Miller Gallery in 2009. He is the recipient of the Independent Spirit Award for feature filmmaking, and has received grants from the Guggenheim, Creative Capital, Rockefeller and Alpert foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Cohen's films have been broadcast internationally, and are in held the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the ACMI in Melbourne.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She writes a bi-monthly column "In These Intemperate Times" for Frieze Art Magazine.
Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist, educator and editor. Her book, Cunt-Ups (2001) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Her work is frequently associated with that of the New Narrative movement in San Francisco and fellow writers Robert Glück, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Kevin Killian, and Eileen Myles.
Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver, British Columbia based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. In 1990, collective members Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart used the intense debates within the queer community around sexual practice in the early 1990s to create the photographic exhibition Drawing the Line. Their photographs depicted a continuum of lesbian sexual practice ranging from kissing to whipping, bondage, and voyeurism. The project encouraged gallery viewers to comment on what they saw and how it made them feel by writing directly on the walls around the prints; allowing the viewer to "draw the line" and examine their ideas and beliefs about different sexual behaviors. “Drawing the Line” was made in response to the “porn wars” of the late 80’s-the feminist debate of if female sexual imagery was more oppressive to women, or if it was empowering to women. Kiss and Tell’s work explicitly embraced depictions of female sexuality, and encouraged the conversation between anti-porn feminists and sex positive feminists. The art was controversial, even more so as it was released in the era of the Red Hot Video Store bombings. The collective displayed their work to point out the double standard in which artists exploring politics and sexuality are “cause for alarm” and yet adult films and magazines that are much more explicit are of no concern. This show was about desensitizing the view of queer sex and relationships. It intended to make lesbian relationships just as visible as straight relationships. Through the intimate exploration of queer bodies, The Kiss and Tell collective gave space for lesbians to perform and share their experiences. The show traveled widely in Canada and the United States in the 1990s, as well as showing in Australia and the Netherlands. In the summer of 2015 Kiss and Tell had redisplayed and revisited their exhibition “Drawing the Line.” This was featured at the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival in celebration of the work’s 25th anniversary, and was the first time in 13 years that it had been displayed.
Belladonna* Collaborative is a small press non-profit publisher and collaborative organization based in Brooklyn, New York City. It was founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky as a reading series at Bluestockings in New York, NY. The reading series quickly expanded to a matrix of readings, publications, and informal salons, featuring avant-garde feminist writing, with an emphasis on hybrid and language-focused writing. Currently, the press operates as a non-hierarchical collaborative, publishing books and hosting literary events with attention to diversity in its roster of authors and editorial board.
Katrina del Mar is a New York–based American photographer, video artist, writer and award-winning filmmaker. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Video, and her films have been screened at numerous festivals internationally. Del Mar has been described as "the lesbian Russ Meyer." Her aesthetic is informed by riot grrrl and 1970s punk.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Pierre-Yves Borgeaud is a Swiss film director. Borgeaud has a bachelor's degree in arts at the Lausanne University in 1990, with a thesis about the influence of jazz on French writers. He has worked as an independent journalist, writing about music and moving images in different media. He also played the drums in jazz and funk bands and worked as a music producer.
Julie Casper Roth, is an American artist, documentary filmmaker, experimental video artist, and writer based in Connecticut.
Lynne Fernie is a Canadian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. She spent fourteen years as the Canadian Spectrum programmer for the Hot Docs Festival from 2002 to 2016, and was described as having a passion as "deep as her knowledge," and it was said that her "championing of Canadian documentaries and the people who make them has never wavered."
Aerlyn Weissman is a two-time Genie Award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker and political activist on behalf of the lesbian community.
Catherine Lord is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
Silvia A. Malagrino is an American multimedia artist, independent filmmaker and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for interdisciplinary work that explores historical and cultural representation, and the intersections of fact, fiction, memory and subjectivity. Her experimental documentary, Burnt Oranges (2005), interwove personal narrative, witness testimony, interviews, and both documentary and re-created footage to examine the long-term effects of Argentina's Dirty War. Malagrino's art has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, Palais de Glace and Centro Cultural Recoleta, La Tertulia Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography of Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Rochester Institute of Technology, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Ateneo de Madrid, among other venues. Her work has been recognized by institutions including the Guggenheim Foundation CINE, the Smithsonian Institution, and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Malagrino is Professor in Photography and Moving Image at the School of Art and Art History of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
