Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Vivienne Dick is an Irish feminist experimental and documentary filmmaker. Her early films helped define the No Wave scene. According to The Irish Times, Dick is "one of the most important film-makers Ireland has produced".
Shirley Clarke was an American filmmaker.
Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.
Peter Tscherkassky is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who works primarily with found footage. All of his work is done with film and heavily edited in the darkroom, rather than relying on recent advances in digital film.
The Diagonale is a film festival that takes place every March in Graz, Austria.
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.
Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A bricoleur who has created both narrative works and documentaries, some projects are scripted and others incorporate improvised performance. She makes use of sync sound, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include genre; women, sexuality and feminism; reenactment; and artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.
Swedish artist Gunvor Grundel Nelson was born in 1931 in Kristinehamn, Sweden, where she now resides. She has worked as an experimental filmmaker since the 1960s. Some of her most widely known works were created while she lived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, where she became well established among other artists in the avant-garde film circles of the 1960s and to the present. As of 2006, she has to her credit 20 films, five videos, and one video installation.
New Horizons Film Festival is an international film festival held annually in July in Wrocław, Poland. It has been organised since 2001. It is one of the biggest and most popular film festivals in Poland. Since 2008 it is accredited by FIAPF with an "avant-garde" specialised competitive status.
The Cinematheque, founded in 1972, is a Canadian charity and non-profit film institute, media education centre, and film exhibitor based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Betzy Bromberg is an American director, editor, and experimental filmmaker. She was the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts, and remains in the position of full time Faculty. Her work has been shown at the Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, Sundance and Vancouver Film Festivals as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives, the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (France).
Michael Loebenstein is a writer, curator and as of 1 October 2017 the director of the Austrian Film Museum. From October 2011 to January 2017 he held the post of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). Since 2013 he is serving as Secretary General of FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives.
Leslie Thornton is an American avant-garde filmmaker and artist.
Schwechater is a 1958 experimental short film by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka. It is the second entry in his trilogy of metrical films, between Adebar and Arnulf Rainer.
Walden, originally titled Diaries, Notes and Sketches , is a 1968 American film by experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. After several years of filming everyday scenes from his life, Mekas was commissioned by the Albright–Knox Art Gallery to make Walden. It was his first major diary film, and he named it after Henry David Thoreau's 1854 memoir Walden. Mekas's film has received acclaim as a work of avant-garde cinema.
