Transmedia Visiting Artist Cathy Crane

Transmedia Visiting Artist Cathy Crane will give a talk on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2 pm. in Shemin Auditorium.

Crane has been making experimental narrative and documentary films on 16mm for nearly 20 years. She was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2013 and received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in film in 2009 for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. The completion of her first feature, “Pasolini’s Last Words,” (2012) was supported by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and enjoyed its world premiere at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal as a “gem of world cinema” in the Panorama International section. It also was featured in the BFI tribute to Pasolini in 2013. Her short 16mm films (1994-2010) have been broadcast on European television, are held in the Forum des Images collection in Paris, and are distributed by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. They have won the following festival awards:  Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Cork 1996), Best Experimental Film (CSU Media Arts 1997), and the Certificate of Merit/New Visions (San Francisco International 2002). In addition to this short work, she produced the experimental biography “Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil” (2006) that was funded by an Individual Media Artist Grant from the San Francisco Film Commission in 2001, was awarded BestNarrative Film (UFVA Juried Screening 2006), and will enjoy its educational release in North America by Films Media Group in 2014. She has also collaborated with Sarah Lewison on “Meal” (2002), a video response to 9/11 included on the Rosenblatt/Zahedi compilation “Underground Zero II,” wrote the introductory essay and co‐edited the volume “(1968): Episodes of Cultures in Contest” with photographer Nicholas Muellner published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2008) and curated numerous film programs, including Queer Innovators for the 1998 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival with Jim Hubbard.

While developing her own fine art installations that have shown in San Francisco and New England, she has collaborated as projection designer and cinematographer for Harun Farocki, Joanna Haigood and  Strom/Carlson, among others. Crane received the first North American survey of her work at LA Filmforum in March 2011 while an artist-in-residence in the directing program at California Institute of the Arts. She is currently associate professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, specializing in directing actors for film.

Contact Person: Weigang Song, Transmedia, 3154276499, wsong05@syr.edu