Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I’m an artist and filmmaker making work around issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. I regard sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. My 40+ films and multiple artworks have been exhibited and awarded internationally, and have variously addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, remote sensing, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, street drag racing, tight rope walking, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. I am based in Chicago where I teach at the University of Illinois.

While at Headlands

I’ll be working on “Hello Ladies”, a feature length experimental documentary about women writing and re-writing history and culture in Ethiopia. It’s a film about sister-ancestors, speech acts and resistance. The project was originally inspired by the Azmari tradition – a class of singing poets, frequently women, who perform sem-enna werq (wax-and-gold), a form of social critique in double entendre with a surface wax meaning and hidden gold. The project seeks contemporary descendants of this form. Who speaks today? Who makes? Who gets heard? How do gesture, rhythm and collective acts operate? How has this tradition of women critiquing power evolved?

I’ll also be developing a collaborative project with science historian and theater director Frédérique Aït-Touati about ecological risk assessment and systems for re-creating weather indoors, focusing on the space between onstage and offstage, cosmograms and storm machines.

Selected Works

Last Things (trailer), 2023; 50 min, 16mm/35mm

Laika (excerpt), 2021; 4:33 min, HD

Vever (for Barbara) (excerpt), 2019; 12 min, 16mm/HD

The Illinois Parables (excerpt), 2016; 60 min. 16 mm.

Hacked Circuit (excerpt), 2014; 15 min. HD video.

…These Blazeing Starrs! (excerpt), 2011; 14 min. 16mm.

O’er the Land (excerpt), 2009; 52 min. 16mm.

The BLVD, (excerpt), 1999; 64 min. SD video.