Alison O'Daniel
Directing
Biography
California based artist Alison O'Daniel was born in 1979 and at age three was diagnosed with 60% binaural loss of hearing; her later work would focus on sound as a topic, an image, and an organizing principle.She studied at the University of California in Irvine and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio in 2003, more recently she has been involved with the California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.Her current projects involve gallery installations,and activist engagement with the deaf and hard of hearing communities.
Known For
Ten year-old SETH wants to give up his toys, but his work-numbed mother LILY needs the spark of their playtime more than he does. Her insistence that he keep the toys leads to some unexpected places.
The Death of Toys
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
The Tuba Thieves
Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay discover a small portal that leads to another dimension where a dance marathon never ends, time collapses, and exhaustion is rampant. The girls travel to a sound chamber deep in the desert where they encounter a speaking dog that offers them a vision of their place in the universe.. Meanwhile, the exhausted marathon contestants continue shuffling their feet with no end in sight.
Night Sky
Using the soundtracks of disaster movies as material, A Disaster is an almost entirely imageless film; comprised of sound and text, it is centered on the physical comprehension of subsonic frequencies, tactile sound, and how experiences of sonic violence mirror the relentless ubiquity of ableism.
A Disaster
Horns blare and sound softly through thick LA air.
The Sea, The Stars, A Landscape
Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim signs the final scene in which the main character, Nyke, goes skinny dipping with her boyfriend Nature Boy. Three narrative versions of the story unfold simultaneously—the written screen-play, a version told by Christine in American Sign Language, and a voiceover reciting the exact English translation of Christine's teleprompter notes.