Jodi Wille is an American film director, curator, and book publisher known for her work exploring American subcultures.
Jodi Wille is an American film director, curator, and book publisher known for her work exploring American subcultures.
Wille directed and produced The Source Family (2013), her first feature-length documentary, with Maria Demopoulos. The film, which unearths the story of the eponymous Los Angeles utopian commune and its charismatic leader, Father Yod, premiered in competition at South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2012, sold out multiple major film festivals, and was released theatrically in 60 cities in May 2013. [1] [2]
Wille is currently directing a feature documentary on The Unarius Academy of Science. [3]
In 1994, R.E.M. gave Wille her first paid directing gig for their "Find the River" music video. [4] Signed to DNA (David Naylor & Associates), she directed a number of music videos in the mid-90s. Wille worked prior to that as assistant to music video and commercial director Samuel Bayer and later as assistant and development consultant to feature film director Roland Joffé. [5]
Throughout the 90s, Wille also worked as a commercial and documentary photographer, shooting billboard campaigns, rock bands and personalities including Sparks (band), Melissa Etheridge, and Vincent Gallo, while also documenting visionary artists and alternative spiritual communities.
In 1998, Wille co-founded Dilettante Press with Steve Nalepa, Nick Rubenstein, and Hedi El Kholti, a publishing house with a focus on self-taught, visionary, and vernacular art and photography. [4] Dilettante published only three titles, but "their impact was considerable." [6] Dilettante produced exhibitions, symposiums, and parties related to their books in galleries and museums in multiple cities in the U.S. and in Europe.
In 2005, Wille founded Process Media with her then-partner (later, husband) Adam Parfrey of Feral House. The imprint focuses on non-fiction, literary memoirs, and illustrated books exploring subcultures and groundbreaking artists such as Andy Kaufman, Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, John Sinclair and MC5, Father Yod and Ya Ho Wha 13, and Moondog. [7] Process has also created a "Self-Reliance Series" of illustrated guide books that promote sustainable and self-sufficient living.
In 2000, Wille, Hedi El Kholti, and Cheryl Dunn co-curated the first exhibition of the work of amateur photographer Gary Lee Boas, "Starstruck: Photographs from Fan", at Deitch Projects. [8] [9] This led to exhibitions at galleries and museums in the U.S. and throughout Europe including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Photographers' Gallery in London, and Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris.
In 2013, Wille was named as co-curator with Rebecca Alban Hoffberger of the American Visionary Art Museum exhibition The Visionary Experience: St. Francis to Finster, a 44-artist, 244-works exhibition which ran 2014-2015. [10]
Since 2014, Wille has curated several exhibitions of photographs, art, costumes, and ephemera produced by the extraterrestrial-channeling spiritual school Unarius Academy of Science, including a 2016 exhibition at the London arts venue The Horse Hospital, [11] works in The Visionary Experience exhibition at American Visionary Art Museum, a 2016 exhibition at The Standard Hotel Hollywood, and at the 2017 Basilisk exhibition at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles. [12] [13]
Over the years, Wille has programmed films and curated cultural events in several cities. [14] [15] [16] From 2007-2017, Wille served as a regular guest programmer at The Cinefamily cinematheque in Los Angeles, hosting the popular "Occult LA" series and other programs including an eclectic range of guests from Kris Kristofferson, Tony Clifton, Rocky Erickson, and Tom Laughlin to white witches, Hare Krishnas, and Bigfoot researchers, as well as live music, ritual performance, panels, and art exhibitions. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
In 2015, Wille presented a retrospective of the films of the Unarius Academy of Science at Cinefamily, which included a Unariun art and artifact exhibition and Unariun workshops. [22] This led to invitations to present Unarius films at the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival and the Horse Hospital arts center in London. [23] [24]
The Source Family (2012, 98 mins.), directed with Maria Demopoulos
We Are Not Alone (2016, 11 mins.)
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and photographer. He attended the Actors Studio, made his first television appearance in 1954, and soon after appeared in Giant (1956). In the next ten years he made a name in television, and by the end of the 1960s had appeared in several films, notably Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Hang 'Em High (1968). Hopper also began a prolific and acclaimed photography career in the 1960s.
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Process Media is an independent publishing house started in 2005 in Los Angeles by Adam Parfrey of Feral House and Jodi Wille of Dilettante Press, and headquartered in Port Townsend.
Father Yod, or YaHoWha, born James Edward Baker, was the American owner of one of the country's first health food restaurants, on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He founded a spiritual commune in the Hollywood Hills known as the Source Family. The Source Family was heavily influenced by the teachings of Yogi Bhajan and the astrological age of Aquarius. The Family practiced communal living in Southern California and later in Hawaii. He was also lead singer of the commune's experimental psychedelic rock band, Ya Ho Wha 13.
Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction.
Founded in 1973 in the Los Angeles area, Ya Ho Wha 13, otherwise known as Ya Ho Wa 13 or Yahowha 13, is a psychedelic rock band fronted by Father Yod, spiritual leader of a religious cult/commune called the Source Family. Ya Ho Wha without the vowels and spaces reduces to YHWH, the tetragrammaton. The band recorded nine LPs full of their extreme psychedelic sound with tribal drums and distorted guitars, some of which were completely unrehearsed jam sessions, others which contained more conventional rock songs.
Dilettante Press is a now defunct independent book publisher, co-founded by Jodi Wille, Nick Rubenstein, and Steven Nalepa in 1998, joined soon after by partner Hedi El Kholti. Dilettante was a publishing house dedicated to "challeng[ing] traditional notions of art and culture," focusing its efforts on featuring visionary, outsider, vernacular art in books.
The Source Family is a 2012 feature documentary film directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos which recounts the story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family. Much material was gleaned from Isis Aquarian's archives of photos, diary, film, cassette tapes of Father Yod's morning class, lost music tapes, graphics; along with input interviews of Source family members and people who knew Jim Baker and / or went to the Source Restaurant.
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