Maureen Selwood
Directing
Biography
Maureen Selwood is a filmmaker artist who works with visual art, digital media, installation, and performance. A pioneer in the field of independent experimental animation, Selwood has both charted new territory for women artists, and reframed conventional notions of women as objects of desire in art history. Rooted aesthetically in film noir, dada and surrealism her work explores carnivals, festivals, and religious rites as celebrations and showcases for the imaginary. After graduating with her MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Selwood found herself at the center of a burgeoning new scene in independent animation, which aligned itself more with the art world than with the traditional animation establishments of the time. Selwood produced such ground breaking films as: Odalisque, The Rug, This Is Just To Say and Pearls. Critics celebrated Selwood's ingenuity and artistic elegance. After NY Selwood moved to Los Angeles where Jules Engel invited her to teach at California Institute of the Arts in the Experimental Animation Program. Shaped by influences she experienced there, she produced: Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir; Hail Mary; Mistaken Identity; Drawing Lessons; and A Modern Convenience. Selwood was a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize and while in Rome she created the installation, As The Veil Lift. Resistance and the book, Green Is for Privacy. As You Desire Me (2009) is an installation created in response to the Iraq War. In 2010, Selwood created digital animations for Rain Coloring Forest by Sardono and Jennifer Tipton at REDCAT. In 2014, Selwood created animation for The Metropolitan Opera's production of the opera Werther, by Jules Massenet. In 2015, Selwood’s film for the composer David Rosenboom, How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, delete (Section VII, Impression), was screened at the Whitney Museum. In 2015, Selwood opened her exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles. Titled Sounding the Note of A, it featured drawings and transfer prints, as well as large sculptural pieces inspired by the balaclavas of Pussy Riot. Also in 2015, Selwood created 29 Cross Examinations. With live performance, film, and transcripts from the actual trial of Joan of Arc, Selwood animates Joan’s interior life and cracks open a new perspective on this much mythologized folk hero. Portrait of Maureen SelwoodStill courtesy of the Academy’s Oral History Projects Department. Copyright © Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Selwood is the recipient of awards from: John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation (Los Angeles); C.O.L.A. Individual Artists Fellowship (LA); New York State Council on the Arts; The Jerome Foundation; The American Film Institute. She is the first artist to receive the Rome Prize in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome in the area of animation. The Academy of Motion Pictures has selected the films of Maureen Selwood for preservation under the supervision of curator and preservationist, Mark Toscano.
Known For

In Chinese New Year holidays, finding the coin inside the dumplings means having a blessed year ahead. A young woman loses a jar on her journey to a new country, which contains the lucky coins she has been collecting growing up. Her new life begins with a search to find the coin.
The Coin

An animated film compiled by David Ehrlich consisting of 27 animators from different countries all explaining themselves through their animation.
Animated Self-Portraits

This is an animated documentary about FOOD! I interviewed vegetarian, vegan, pescetarian and meat eater about their opinions about food and life choices. Then I animate real food with stop-motion technique based on the interviews. By putting the conversations in different context, the food speak for themselves.
Food
The film, Al Tudi Tuhak, is a creation story inspired by the art and mythology of the Northwest coast people. The story involves the creator, or "The Great Father" as he whittles the world into existence. Each of his wood shavings became fish, trees, birds,... even the sun and moon.
Al Tudi Tuhak

A story of loss told through a daughter looking back on her mother’s life in rural Ireland who receives a package one day from the postman.
The Rug
At the end of the workday, the women of the city head to the bathhouse.
The Bathhouse

A woman’s voice obsessively uses numbers to tell us something while handling a set of rosary beads. This allows her to keep her memories alive and to give meaning to the traces left by her life.
Hail Mary

Inspired by the 1917 ballet, PARADE, by Satie, Cocteau and Picasso, the film takes a childhood memory of loss and uses metaphoric allusions to create a different outcome.
Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir

Cole Porter’s song from ANYTHING GOES inspired David Rosenboom to pose a new music aesthetic against the ascetic, disciplined, puritanical streak that one associates in this country with the Pilgrims. Selwood’s animation gives the music a rejuvenated sensuality and mysticism.
How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed On The Pilgrims

Revisits the forgotten characters and deserted landscapes of Robert Aldrich’s classic film noir, KISS ME DEADLY (1955). Scenes re-photographed and then drawn over to produce a commentary on the artifice of cinema and memory.
Mistaken Identity

130 children along with staff and teachers worked together shooting indoors and out using stop motion techniques to make a film. The unexpected resulted as children inspired each other and the results are magical.
All Creatures Great and Small

With minimal tools and the limitation of a single image of a woman’s head a set of pearls activates a woman’s inner drive expressing freedom of movement. Animation suggests quickly a series of possible choices. The decision is ultimately hers. An animation exploring metamorphosis accompanied with music by Meredith Monk.
Pearls

A meditation on the city of Rome when the Iraq War was declared.
As You Desire Me

A woman finds a tape cassette at a yard sale. It comes with a drawing exercise, the upside down drawing lesson from DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN by Betty Edwards. The exercise becomes an obsession yet keeps the woman’s insomnia at bay. Her night visitors, animals of the night, allow her to reconnect with nature.
Drawing Lessons
Jamie Maxfield's graduate thesis project in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts. A Silver Medal winner at the Student Academy Awards.
Between the Lines

Animated short.
Blue Poodle Chair

"I think of Odalisque as my first film. It was completed after film school and I worked with just a graphite pencil, a small group of colored pencils and animation bond. It is a trilogy of amorous dreams coming from the imagination of a woman recalling her childhood, her beloved twin so difficult to separate from and becoming an adult sexual person. The aria Sempre Libera from La Triviata by Verdi opens the film and the poem Leda and the Swan by WB Yeats ends it. It was great to work with Michael Riesman who created the sound track. I loved working in NYC in those days with Robin McDaniel, Rebecca High and others." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2017.
Odalisque

Against the backdrop of Niagara Falls the domestic space for laundry undergoes a change when a wringer washing machine confronts a woman whose instincts question its value.