whatsherface: IRL

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PERFORMER BIOS

Lily Benson is an American filmmaker and visual artist. Her work examines feminist history and reconstructs it into new narrative forms. She is best known for co-directing the feature The Filmballad of Mamadada. Most recently, she performed at The Kitchen in NYC and presented work at Caves Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Her work has previously shown at The Louisiana Museum, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Malmö Art Museum, and Nicolai Wallner Gallery.

Multidisciplinary artist Kayla Guthrie grew up in Canada and has been based in NYC since 2008. Her visual art and musical performances have been exhibited or occurred at Real Fine Arts, Bodega, Off Vendome, JTT, The Whitney Museum of American Art (in collaboration with Nate Lowman’s “Homage To Jay Defeo”, 2013), MINI/Goethe Institut Curatorial Residency, Signal, Basilica Hudson, Pioneer Works, Knockdown Center, Deli Gallery, SADE LA, and others. Her 12″ EP Blue (Mixed Media, 2015) was described by a review in The Wire to “occupy a twilight zone both lyrically and conceptually…as if Guthrie’s thoughts and words coincide with an atmosphere that she contingently occupies for this moment.” Its release was accompanied by a series of gallery performances at Greene Naftali (New York), Contemporary Art Daily (Chicago), Massimo de Carlo (London), Sandy Brown (Berlin), and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf’s 2015 graduation ceremony as well as a residency and performance at Electro Müller, the former site of Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studios in Düsseldorf.

Ursula Kennedy is the work of Brooklyn-based, inter-disciplinary artist Martha Ursula Moszczynski. Characterized by contrapuntal pulses and cathartic lyrical incantations, the performance draws from an ongoing series of abstracted songs incorporating archetypal folk narratives into loose song structures. Ursula Kennedy has been included in Northside Fest and performed at venues such as Trans Pecos, Panopoly Performance Laboratory, Secret Project Robot and Vox Populi in Philidelphia.

Julia Santoli is an inter-disciplinary artist working through image, gesture, and sound while navigating memory and presence—how past experience manifests in the present as ruins, and how these traces transform within the ghost-nature of sound through acoustics, audio feedback, and vocalisation. She has presented solo and collaborative works at spaces such as Queens Museum, New York Live Arts, Flux Factory, Issue Project Room, Disjecta, Judson Memorial Church, Widow Jane Mine Cave, and Panoply Performance Laboratory.

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FILMMAKER BIOS

Artist, filmmaker Ayo Akingbade was born in Hackney, East London. She graduated from BA (Hons) Film Practice at London College of Communication in 2017. Her first short, In Ur Eye (2015), was screened at the 12th London Short Film Festival, hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Her work has exhibited at the Museum of London and screened at festivals such as Sheffield Doc/Fest, Transatlantyk Fim Festival and Berlin Feminist Film Festival. Tower XYZ (2016) was commissioned for Channel 4 Random Acts, produced with Chisenhale Gallery and ICA. It received a special mention award at the 63rd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Sofia Bohdanowicz is an experimental filmmaker from Toronto, Canada. Her most recent collection of shorts, Last Poems(2014), explores the passing of her paternal grandmother through the poetry of her great-grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczowa. The trilogy screened at the Museum of Moving Image in New York and at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Her first feature, Never Eat Alone, a genre-defying documentary about lost love, family and regret, premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where she won the Emerging Canadian Director Award. Bohdanowicz’s second feature, Maison du bonheur, had its World Premiere at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) and screened with a retrospective of her work. The film made its North American Premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. Bohdanowicz is currently in production for her third feature film (a collaboration with actor Deragh Campbell) and will be pursuing her MFA at York University in the fall.

Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, installation and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Karnnert Art Museum (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Art Pace (San Antonio, TX), and Project Row Houses (Houston, TX). She has been awarded an Artadia grant, and residencies at the Galveston Artist Residency, Milay Colony, Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and In-Situ-In-Place. Her work and performances have been included in group exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Betonville, AK), The New Museum (NY), and The Contemporary Art Museum Houston. She holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University, and is currently an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.

Michelle Mackenzie (b.1987) completed a BA in Communication and the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, after which she enrolled in the graduate Program in Literature at Duke University.  While there, she became interested in French literatures of necrophiliac-agonies, the possibilities of sounding the unheard hills of banshee-perturbations, and the cultural amnesia that devours female genius.  This last interest resulted in her first film, Tender Meats (2016).

Veena Rao’s work has screened at festivals across the U.S. and internationally and has been featured on publications such as The Atlantic. Last spring, she directed So You Think You Can Vote? (2016) for We the Voters, a series of 20 viral films that aim to demystify how our government works and activate citizens to vote, co-produced by Vulcan Productions, Show of Force and Warrior Poets. She is an alumna of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, and New York Women in Film & Television.

Amy Reid is a filmmaker and artist based out of San Diego. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union (2009) and is currently a Master in Fine Arts candidate at the University California, San Diego. Solo exhibitions include The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York; The Queens Council on the Arts, and The Experimental Media Lab at UCSD, La Jolla CA. She has participated in selected screenings at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, China; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Norwood Art Club in New York. Amy has also organized a number of film programs including Las Chicas Presents, a seasonal film series in New York in its sixth year, presenting works of new and emerging filmmakers and media artists. She has attended the Snug Harbor Artist in Residency Program in New York; Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide in Queens; and Hunter College’s Ceramics Artist in Residence in New York. Amy is currently completing a feature-length documentary about the lives of female long haul truck drivers.

Alex Martinis Roe’s current projects focus on feminist genealogies. They seek to foster productive relationships between different generations of feminists as a way of participating in the construction of feminist histories and futures. This involves developing research and storytelling methodologies, which employ non-linear understandings of time, respond to the specific practices of different communities, experiment with the apparatus of the discursive encounter, and imagine how these entanglements can inform new political practices. Upcoming solo shows include: GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; To Become Two, Badischer Kunstverein, Kalrsruhe, Germany, 2017. Recent solo shows include: To Become Two at The Showroom, London, 2017; ar/ge Kunst, Bolzano, 2017; Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, 2016. Recent solo performance events include: Our Future Network at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam 2016 and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2015. Recent group shows include: The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Los Derivados / The Derivatives, SlyZmud Gallery, Buenos Aires, 2017; Performing Knowledge, Dienstgebäude, Zürich, 2017; No New Kind of Duck, Yvonne Lambert, Berlin, 2016; Emphasis Repeats, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale on Hudson, NY, 2016.

Maya Yu Zhang (张宇) is a performer and producer who primarily practices in film. Her works explore the web of human relations prompted by languages, histories, and clichés. Maya has presented works at Helsinki Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, Icebox Project Space, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Anthology Film Archive, New York Public Library, Panoply Performance Lab, Knockdown Center etc. She was a UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow 2016-2017 and a recent staff member at Flaherty Seminar.