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Cathy CraneAssistant Professor
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CATHY LEE CRANE (media artist) first began making films in the late 1980s under the tutelage of experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller. Her first media project, a video presented nationally on BRAVO cable network for World AIDS Day entitled Heroes in Our Community, was a profile of AIDS activist Brent Nicholson Earle (1990).
Having received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1990, Cathy moved to the West Coast to pursue her Masters of Fine Arts degree at San Francisco State University. While there, she was nominated for and won numerous awards including the prestigious Eastman Kodak scholarship in 1997 as "one of the United States' most promising talents of the future generation of filmmakers." In addition to numerous international film festival screenings, her short films have received the following recognition.
Not for Nothin' (1996) won best black-and-white cinematography in a short film at the 1996 Cork International Film Festival in Ireland. Time Out/New York called it "a lush, meditative film that eschews stylistic and narrative convention."
Sketches after Halle (1997) was awarded best experimental film at the 1998 CSU Media Arts Festival in California.
The Girl from Marseilles (2000) won a Golden Gate Certificate of Merit in New Visions from the San Francisco International Film Festival and received its world premiere at the 2000 Vienna International Film Festival. RE/Search magazine hailed it as "a rare experience of art, a gorgeously photographed film poem." It is now a part of the permanent collection at the Forum des Images in Paris.
All of her short films have been broadcast on television in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by ZDF and were presented in a special filmmaker portrait in Germany at the Oldenburg Film Festival in April 2001 as well as in the United States on the Southern Circuit in March 2003.
Two subsequent works were shot on digital video. Meal (2002) (directed with Sarah Lewison) has been released on DVD as part of an American artists‚ response to September 11 entitled Underground Zero. Le Taxi (2003), a piece adapted from a short story by Violette Leduc, was shot in a cave outside Paris, France, using classic rear-screen technology.
She has also directed music videos, created installations, and photographed numerous films for other directors, including I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, the feature-length documentary project she also researched for Harun Farocki. She has lectured on the intersections between queer and experimental cinema and has curated a dozen short film programs in San Francisco, New York, and Europe, including the six-part series Queer Innovators, co-curated with Jim Hubbard for the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She is the recipient of a 2001 Individual Artist Media Arts Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission which launched the production of her full-length film Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2006) which received the Jury Award in Narrative from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) in 2006. This film will tour the Southern Circuit in April 2008. A major portion of this film was produced with Ithaca College students in key production roles during the Spring 2004 semester (see PHOTO GALLERY). She is currently working on a short film shot in Rome entitled Adrift: The Death Pasolini Foretold.
