Cecilia Dougherty

Shot primarily in Fisher-Price pixelvision, for the “murky look of memory," COAL MINER'S GRANDDAUGHTER is a profoundly moving family portrait focusing on the youngest daughter Jane, as she leaves her Pennsylvania home and finds sexual independence in San Francisco.

With an all-female cast, featuring Suzie Bright as John Lennon, Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit plays with the romanticized history of the iconic Fab Four, gently mocking John and Yoko’s banal squabbles and obsessive rituals of self-display. Based obliquely on Yoko Ono’s book, the piece works on many levels to reposition this mythic tale of the Beatles by casting '80s women in mod drag—effectively mapping the lesbian sub-culture onto heterosexual mass culture. Discounting the importance of reproducing facts and historical accuracy, Dougherty gives an incisive reading of the creation of pop culture icons: it doesn’t matter who plays John Lennon because ultimately John Lennon is not a person anymore. As a star, he is a projection of our society’s collective needs and desires.

An essay and a documentary examining the failure of society to accept feminist ideologies to a point where feminism could have an appreciable, lasting or functional effect on the lives of ordinary women as a class. This video represents a deeply personal expression of liberation as well as frustration, and draws conclusions about feminism, love, and sex from personal experience.

"SICK is a video I made in 1986 while in grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute. The voice-over is extemporaneous, created after I had shot and edited the image. The effects were done in-camera - the Art Institute had a studio with a large Grass Velley switcher and it coould generate a lot of colors - whatever you wanted - and it wasn't digital, so the colors are all along an analogue spectrum." - Cecilia Dougherty

A portrait of poet Eileen Myles as she reads from her novel "Cool For You" and goes about the day in her East Village home.

A portrait of New York author Joe Westmoreland. Joe is reading from his short story "Sweet Baby Joe."

Cecilia Dougherty’s first video, made while she was a student at Berkeley, Gay Tape: Butch and Femme applies “a little fine-tuning” to the question of representation, honing in on the subjective particularities of the butch-femme dynamic as experienced by members of Dougherty’s local Bay Area dating pool.

This video is about the idea of narcissistic transference, sexual dependency, and the failure to distinguish between the self and the loved one. It is also about using love to create a border between oneself and political and psychological oppression.

Taking queer artistic license, Dougherty and Singer together portray a gay male playwright who took 1960s London by storm. The result is a witty play on narcissism and split personality that captures the banality of stardom while paying tribute to promiscuity and transgression.

An afternoon with San Francisco writers Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo, as Kevin reads one of Cedar's poems and then one of his own.

Gone is a two-channel installation based on the second episode of An American Family — the landmark PBS verité documentary about the Loud Family of Santa Barbara, California. Dougherty has created a free-form variation on the theme of parental visits to wayward queer children by mapping the dialogue and plot onto a contemporary community of artists and writers in New York today, paying homage to the art underground and the city itself.

A 1987 video by Cecilia Dougherty