Carolyn Lazard

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster uses the first program shown with captions on US television in 1972—Julia Child's The French Chef—to compose a wider study on the terms of media accessibility. The video’s compelling spoken/written manifesto-like text (and deadpan audio description) counter-narrates the original broadcast and casts a profound critique of inclusion as add-on or afterthought.

Video by Carolyn Lazard.

Get Well Soon is constructed and cinematic but still deals with personal experience via self-portraiture (sometimes via selfie stick). Lazard shows the experience of chronic pain—and the grotesque pitfalls of navigating the health care bureaucracy—through the metaphor of a first-person role- playing game.

A conversation between a therapist and their client unfolds as a yellow ball swings back and forth. Replicating simple animations of online EMOR videos used to treat PTSD, the film feeds Octavia Butler's short story 'Bloodchild' through scripted therapeutic protocols, destabilising relations between coercion and consent, form and content, trauma and fiction.

Vital depicts a black birthing person’s first prenatal visit.

Fiction Contract documents a childbirth simulation facilitated by The Maternal Mortality Reduction Program (MMRP). Across all five boroughs of New York City, this team trains medical professionals through complex childbirth simulations. NYC H+H selected an all-black team of administrators, midwives, doctors, and nurses for this simulation. It was performed with and by Jayda, a black birthing mannequin who can simulate different complex childbirth scenarios. In 2020, as part of a comprehensive plan to “eliminate disparities in maternal mortality between Black and White women,” the Deblasio administration earmarked funds to incentivize medical mannequin manufacturers to produce mannequins with brown skin. Prior to 2020, almost all medical mannequins were white.