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.
No wave cinema was an underground filmmaking movement that flourished on the Lower East Side of New York City from about 1976 to 1985. Associated with the artists’ group Collaborative Projects, no wave cinema was a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized dark edgy mood and unrehearsed immediacy above many other artistic concerns – similar to the parallel no wave music movement in its raw and rapid style.
Lourdes Portillo is a Mexican film director, producer, and writer.
The Margaret Mead Film Festival is an annual film festival held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is the longest-running, premiere showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist who is best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Marie Losier is a filmmaker and curator who's worked in New York City for 25 years and has shown her films and videos at museums, galleries, biennials and festivals. Losier studied literature at the University of Nanterre and Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York City. She has made a number of film portraits of avant-garde directors, musicians and composers, such as the Kuchar brothers, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad, Genesis P-Orridge, Alan Vega, Peter Hristoff and Felix Kubin. Whimsical, poetic, dreamlike and unconventional, her films explore the life and work of these artists.
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.
Birgit Hein was a German film director, producer, performance artist, university professor, and screenwriter who has made experimental films since 1960s, with her then husband Wilhelm Hein.
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.
Jennifer Elster is an American experimental artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer, musician, and performer. She is the founder of The Development, a film and art studio based in New York City. She is best known for her performance artwork, her solo multidisciplinary exhibitions, The Retrospective of an Extroverted Recluse, and The Wake The F*ck Up Show, as well as her artistic collaborations transforming the late David Bowie into different characters and having written lyrics Yoko Ono performed for the online cinematic excursion Elster helmed entitled ITW Pathway featuring Will Oldham and the late Glenn O'Brien. Elster conceived and directed her upcoming fourteen year film project ...In the Woods , which features subjects such as Terrence Howard, Debra Winger, Questlove, Rosie Perez, and Dave Matthews, among others. Elster's performance and video art have been exhibited at the New Museum and Central Booking gallery, in group shows with artists, such as Jonas Mekas and the late Kate Millett, and she has performed at such galleries as Signs and Symbols Gallery, Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, and The Development Underground. Her work focuses on the complexities of humanity and the ongoing fight for social justices. She designs under the J. Elster brand.
Kirsten Johnson is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. She is mostly known for her camera work on several well-known feature-length documentaries such as Citizenfour and The Oath. In 2016, she released Cameraperson, a film which consists of various pieces of footage from her decades of work all over the world as a documentary cinematographer. Directed by Johnson herself, Cameraperson went on to be praised for its handling of themes about documentary ethics interwoven with Johnson's personal reflection on her experiences.
Aldo Tambellini was an Italian-American artist. He pioneered electronic intermedia, and was a painter, sculptor, and poet. He died at age 90, in November 2020.
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."
Daniel Nearing is a Chicago, Illinois-based director, screenwriter, and independent filmmaker. Hogtown, his "period-less" American film, has been called "the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date" and named one of the 10 Best Films of 2016 by Ben Kenigsberg, who reviewed the film for The New York Times. Nearing was named the inaugural Filmmaker in Residence for the City of Chicago and Chicagoan of the Year for Film (2016–17) by the Chicago Tribune
Jeanne C. Finley is an American artist who works with representational media including film, photography, and video. Her projects take a variety of forms including site-specific projections, sculptural installations, drawing, experimental non-fiction films, and engaged participatory events. She is a member of the San Francisco Threshold Choir and frequently incorporates the choir and original songs into her work. She has collaborated with artist and educator John Muse on numerous films and installations since 1989.
Barbara Sykes into a family of artists, designers and inventors. Since childhood, she has produced work in a variety of different art forms. In 1974, she became one of Chicago’s pioneering video and new media artists and, later to include, independent video producer, exhibition curator and teacher. Sykes is a Chicago based experimental video artist who explores themes of spirituality, ritual and indigeneity from a feminist perspective. Sykes is known for her pioneering experimentation with computer graphics in her video work, utilizing the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at a time when this technology was just emerging. Her early works broke new grounds in Chicago’s emerging New Media Art scene, and continue to inspire women to explore experimental realms. With a passion for community, she fostered significant collaborations with many institutions that include but are not limited to University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Center for New Television, and (art)n laboratory. These collaborations became exemplary for the showcasing of new media work. The wave of video, new media and computer art that she pioneered alongside many other seminal early Chicago New Media artists persists as a major influence for artists and educators today. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Metropolitan Museum of Art , Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art and SIGGRAPH. Sykes’s tapes have been broadcast in Sweden, Italy, Puerto Rico and extensively throughout in the USA, including “The Independents,” PBS national broadcast, 1985, and national cablecast, 1984. Media Burn has a selection of her tapes online and over 200 of her raw footage, master edits, dubs and compilation tapes in their archives. Select grants include a National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute Regional Fellowship, Evanston Art Council Cultural Arts Fund and several Illinois Arts Council grants.
Ja'Tovia Gary is an American artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, and others. She is best known for her documentary film The Giverny Document (2019), which received awards including the Moving Ahead Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Juror Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
Sarita Khurana is a film director, producer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Khurana's films explore South Asian stories from female perspectives. Migration, memory, culture, gender, and sexuality are common themes throughout her work. Khurana was the first Desi woman to win the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca Film Festival with her collaborator, Smriti Mundhra.
