Jessica Bardsley
Directing
Biography
Jessica Bardsley is an artist-scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Practice and Theory at Colgate University and a Visiting Fellow in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her films have screened within the U.S. and internationally at festivals like CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, EMAF, Flaherty NYC, RIDM, True/False, and many more. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, and numerous Film Study Center fellowships. Her research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Known For
In 1890, one man had the idea to collect every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare and release them into Central Park. The only bird to survive in the New World was the European starling, which became one of the most common birds in North America. Its introduction is now widely considered a major environmental disaster.
The Commoners
Goodbye Thelma synthesizes footage from the 1991 film Thelma & Louise and footage of the author's own making to create a mysterious, and at times disturbing, auto-fictional exploration of the joys and terrors of traveling as a woman alone.
Goodbye Thelma
JoAnn Elam was an experimental filmmaker, postal worker, and social activist. She is most known for her films Rape and Lie Back and Enjoy it. This film remixes JoAnn's footage as a way of introducing viewers to her life and work. Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives with music by Tim Kinsella.
Lie Back and Enjoy It: A Film About JoAnn Elam
Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film turns to the earth to explore how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.
The Making and Unmaking of the Earth
Drawing on the filmmaker's own experiences of insomnia, this nocturnal transmission looks at outer space through the X-ray specs of (un)consciousness. The night sky and the mind's eye have more in common than you'd ever dream—friction points and connecting dots that form constellations of avian images, clusters of Ambien text, galaxies of work worry and sleep debt.
Life Without Dreams
A little essay about certain qualities shared by Emily Dickinson and Troglodytes troglodytes (the winter wren). A spontaneous collaboration by two women on opposite coasts searching for elusive things.
The Wren
A film about shoplifting, depression, and Winona Ryder, made of stolen materials.