L7 is an American all-female punk rock band founded in Los Angeles, California, first active from 1985 to 2001 and re-formed in 2014. Their longest standing lineup consists of Suzi Gardner, Donita Sparks, Jennifer Finch, and Dee Plakas. L7 has released seven studio albums and has toured widely in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, and South America. "Pretend We're Dead" was heavily played on US alternative radio and entered the top 10 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart in 1992.
Allison Wolfe is a Los Angeles–based singer, songwriter, writer, and podcaster. As a founding member and lead singer of the punk rock band Bratmobile, she became one of the leading voices of the riot grrl movement.
Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.
Lunachicks are an American punk rock band from New York City. The band formed in 1987 and had been on hiatus since 2001, with the band reuniting in 2019. The band cited influences including the Ramones, Kiss, and the MC5.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Transparent is a 2005 documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jules Rosskam. Its title is a play on the words “trans” and “parent” implying the invisibility of transgender parenting in society today. The documentary follows 19 transgender men from 14 different states who have given birth to, and in most cases, gone on to raise, their biological children and the challenges they face while transitioning.
Rock for Choice was a series of benefit concerts held over a ten-year period between 1991 and 2001. The concerts were designed to allow musicians to show their support for the abortion rights movement in the United States and Canada.
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.
International Pop Underground Convention is a live compilation LP/CD/cassette which documents the 1991 music festival of the same name. Various recordings from the festival were compiled by K Records and released as a double album and CD, featuring music by twenty-one different bands.
Gariné Torossian is a Canadian filmmaker. Her works include Stone, Time, Touch which won best documentary at the Warsaw International Film Festival in 2007. Her films have screened at MoMa, the Telluride Film Festival (Colorado), Lux Cinema (London), the Egyptian Theatre, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Warsaw International Film Festival, Berlinale, and a host of cinematheques, including those in Berlin, Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Torossian's debut short, Visions (1992), was part of a retrospective at Centre Pompidou when she was 22. Her subsequent shorts were screened at New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series when she was 25, and at the Spielberg theatre at the Egyptian in Los Angeles (2019). Torossian's work has been broadcast on Arte France, Documentary Channel (Canada), Bravo Canada, Sundance Channel (USA), SBS (Australia) and WTN (Canada). Her films focus on notions of memory, longing and identity, underlined by her diverse and comprehensive filmography.
Rakhshān Banietemad is an internationally and critically acclaimed Iranian film director and screenwriter who is widely considered a premier female director and her films have been praised at international festivals as well as being popular with Iranian critics and audiences. Her title as "First Lady of Iranian Cinema" is not only a reference to her prominence as a filmmaker, but also connotes her social role of merging politics and family in her work. Her signature style is that she focuses on a character representing a part of society to explore it while staying objectively neutral. The first period of Banietemad's cinematic activity originates from dark humor. Still, in the second period of her work, dark humor gives way to serious and influential films, and deeper and broader issues are addressed. Banietemad has a more realistic view of life.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Christine Welsh is a Métis Canadian filmmaker, feminist and retired associate professor at the University of Victoria.
Feminism has affected culture in many ways, and has famously been theorized in relation to culture by Angela McRobbie, Laura Mulvey and others. Timothy Laurie and Jessica Kean have argued that "one of [feminism's] most important innovations has been to seriously examine the ways women receive popular culture, given that so much pop culture is made by and for men." This is reflected in a variety of forms, including literature, music, film and other screen cultures.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington, and the greater Pacific Northwest, and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. A subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music, and politics, it is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express anger, rage, and frustration, emotions considered socially acceptable for male songwriters but less commonly for women.
The International Pop Underground Convention was a 1991 punk and alternative rock music festival in Olympia, Washington. The six-day convention centered on a series of performances at the Capitol Theater. Throughout August 20–25, 1991, an exceptionally large number of independent bands played, mingled and collaborated at the Capitol and other venues within the Olympia music scene. A compilation of live music from the event was released later by the local record label K Records.
Alexandra Jeanne "Alex" Juhasz is a feminist writer and theorist of media production.
Madhusree Dutta is an Indian filmmaker, author and curator.
Kay Armatage is a Canadian filmmaker, former programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and Professor emerita at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and Women & Gender Studies Institute. Though she attained a B.A. in English Literature from Queen's University, her name is generally linked with the University of Toronto.
