The Fancy (2000) video still [Enlarge in New Window]

Elisabeth Subrin: UP

Email Elisabeth Subrin at subrin@mindspring.com

Upcoming Events:

November 8-January 11, 2009: Elisabeth Subrin exhibits her 2-channel HD installation, Sweet Ruin, in the group exhibition Technically Sweet, at Overgaden Art Space in Copenhagen, organized by Yvette Brackman, Lia Gangitano and Maria Finn. Overgaden

Bio:

Elisabeth Subrin's films and videos examine the intersections of history and subjectivity within female biography. Engaging conventions of documentary and personal narrative, the works strategically undermine their own forms, shifting historical periods, genres and characters to explore the residual impact of the 1960's, and the hazy boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.

Subrin has presented her films extensively in the United States and abroad, including at the New York Film Festival, The Whitney Biennial, American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. One woman shows include San Francisco Cinematheque, Film Forum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, The Vienna International Film Festival, The Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, The Northwest Film Center, The Film Center at The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Fancy (2000) premiered at the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and was subsequently awarded the 2001 VIPER International Award for Film/Video and Second Prize at the 2001 Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Shulie (1997) received the 1998 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Independent/Experimental Film/Video, and Best Experimental Film at the 2000 New England Film and Video Festival. Swallow (1995) was awarded First Place Experimental at the 1996 USA Film Festival, and Juror's Choice at the 1996 Charlotte Film and Video Festival. Her work has been covered extensively in The New York Times, Artforum, New Literary Histories, Los Angeles Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Chicago Reader, Frieze, BOMB, The Village Voice, Afterimage and Film Comment.

In addition to her own work, Subrin has collaborated with many artists and producers, such as on Crisis in Woodlawn (1994) a documentary which traces the history of a Chicago southside housing collective for single mothers and their children. Other projects include The Judy Spots(1995) five television spots produced with Sadie Benning for MTV, and The File Room (1994), an interactive electronic archives produced by Antonio Muntadas. She has curated film and video programs for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Thread Waxing Space in New York, The Five Colleges Film Council, The MIX Festival, and Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. She recently directed a music video for the New York-based feminist electronic band Le Tigre (well, well, well, 2002) and worked as a creative consultant and videographer for the historical documentary Slumming It: Myth and Culture on the Bowery (2002), produced by Mixed Greens.

Subrin was born in Boston in 1965 and received a BFA in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. In 1995 she received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught there in the Film Department, First Year and Graduate Programs from 1995-1997. She was Five College Visiting Assistant Professor of Film/Video Production based at Amherst College from 1997-2001, and subsequently a 2001-2002 Visiting Lecturer in Film Studies at Amherst, as well as a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Center for Media, Culture and History. Subrin has received grants and fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Andrea Frank Foundation, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Yaddo and MacDowell Foundations, The Illinois Arts Council, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Center for New Television. She was a 2003 Sundance Institute Lab Fellow, participating in their Writer's and Director's Labs with her first feature length screenplay, Up. She is a 2004-05 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and currently teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Fantasy & Myth | New York | 2001