Cathy Crane

Cathy Crane

Professor and CPMA Degree Program Director, Media Arts, Sciences and Studies
School: Roy H. Park School of Communications
Phone: 607-274-1035
Office: Roy H Park School of Communications 340, Ithaca, NY 14850
Specialty: DIRECTING Actors for Film

CATHY LEE CRANE is the recipient of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. She had previously received a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship for Film and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work enjoyed its first national survey at the National Gallery of Art in 2015 as part of their series American Originals Now. Her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front that was produced with the assistance of IC students and premiered at the San Francisco IndeFest in 2018. In 2020, Crane released Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the US/Mexico borderlands. It was supported by the El Paso Community Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. All of her short films have been broadcast on television in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by ZDF/3sat and are distributed on 16mm celluloid by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. 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 and installation 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.

Her critically acclaimed film Pasolini's Last Words, an experimental full-length biography on the last year of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's life, enjoyed its world premiere in 2012 as a "gem of world cinema" in the Panorama International Section of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal. It went on to be a part of major Pasolini retrospectives at the British Film Institute in London, the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, and Arsenal in Berlin. The film was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail when it screened at Union Docs in Brooklyn at the conclusion of the MoMA retrospective in 2012.

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