BARBARA
HAMMER:
Biography
"I choose film and video as a medium to make the invisible, visible. Anyone can be left out of history. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. A multi-level cinema that engages them viscerally and intellectually activates my audiences. I want people to leave the theater with fresh perceptions and emboldened to take active and political stances for social change in a global environment."
Barbara Hammer is an internationally recognized film artist who has made 80 films/videos for which she received the prestigious Frameline Award for making a significant contribution to lesbian and gay cinema. Hammer has completed 7 features in 7 years. Her trilogy of experimental documentaries on lesbian and gay histories is already considered classic cinema: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000).
In The Exploding Eye, A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema, Wheeler Winston Dixon writes:
"Hammer's intense productivity places her on the scale of Brakhage or Warhol as a major force in the independent cinema; Hammer neatly inverts the patriarchal forces implicitly and often "invisibly" at work in independent cinema practice."
- Feature Documentaries
completed in 2000:
History Lessons, premiered The Frameline Film Festival, S.F. The Independent Feature Market (Sept.).
Devotion, A Fim about Ogawa Productions, premieres: Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, 9/00 The Margaret Mead Film Festival , 11/00
My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, (to be released) - Selected Awards:
2000 Frameline Award, Frameline International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
1998 Retrospective: Immaginaria Women's Film Festival, Italy Sundance, Berlin Film Festival premiere of Tender Fictions
1994 Retrospective: Out in South Africa Film Festival., Johannesburg/Cape Town, South Africa Retrospective: Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln
1999 Polar Bear Award, Berlin International Film Festival Sundance, Toronto, Berlin premieres of Nitrate Kisses Retrospective: Film Forum, Directors Guild of American, Los Angeles - Selected Grants and Fellowships:
2000 Creative Capital for Resisting Paradise
1999 Camargo Foundation Residency
2000 The Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship The Heart Throb Award for The Female Closet at Festival de Films des Femmes, Creteil, France Bronze Apple, Nat. Media Alliance, for Female Closet N.Y.State Council on the Arts Film Production Grant
1997 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow Award in Film Art Matters Grant in Film Production Arts Link Travel Grant to Ukraine - Juror:
Sundance Film Festival ('94)
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival ('94).
1996 New York State Council on the Arts Video Prod. Grant - Honors:
Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials ('85;'93;95) Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobes ('85;'91;'95;'98)
