BIO/artist statement

I am a Chicago-based filmmaker, installation artist, educator, and curator who is inspired by the enlightening, humanizing, and healing capacities of storytelling. For the past 35 years, I have maintained a collaborative social practice and exhibition career embracing and interrogating the indivisibility of making art and making relationships. I work in documentary and experimental film, installation, participatory performance, and social practice art. My work is intimate, stylistically mixed, viewed from multiple perspectives, improvisational, and intentionally open-ended. It features accessible voices in crafted images that showcase narrative agency and human connectedness. My installations aspire to create spaces for community healing.

I have collaborated with a wide range of under-represented and misrepresented communities including people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ youth, older sex workers, rural hospital workers, families of victims of police killings, and women in the prison system. My work has shown across the US and internationally in film festivals, galleries, and museums including Reel Abilities Film Festivals; Southern Circuit Tour; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago IL; Slamdance Film Festival, Park City UT; Cinema Mostra AIDS, Sao Paulo; Feminist Active Documentary Video Festa, Tokyo; Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco; Creative Time’s Democracy in America; Chicago Humanities Festival; Gene Siskel Film Center; and the United Nations. The films are also widely distributed in educational institutions. Major awards include an Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Fellowship, a Purpose Prize Fellowship, the Women’s eNews Ida B. Wells Bravery in Journalism Award and “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” recognition, and the Chicago Foundation for Women Impact Award and the Illinois Humanities Council Towner Award.

My most recent works include Code of the Freaks, a feature-length documentary examining the representation of disability in Hollywood cinema from the perspectives of disabled artists and culture critics. The film’s North American distributor is Kino Lorber and its international distributor is Reservoir Docs. It is currently screening on Amazon, iTunes, Kino Now, Vudu, Google Play and Kanopy. Additionally, Present Absence, a five-channel video installation made with families of people killed by Chicago police, has exhibited in multiple galleries across Chicago and is now a website.

I find my artistic and social aliveness in collectivity. I am a founding member, contributing artist, curator, and organizer of PO Box Collective, an intergenerational social practice and creative engagement center in Rogers Park with a mission of radical art, mutual aid, and community programming. I founded Beyondmedia Education, where from 2000 to 2013 I led workshops and made films with people who are traditionally excluded from media production and self-representation. We co-crated videos, exhibitions, websites, and social media campaigns. The vast Beyondmedia archive of documentary and youth-authored videos is part of the Media Burn Archive. I am a Senior Lecturer in the Art Education department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.