Draft:Teresa Grimes



Teresa Grimes (born July 1954) is a British filmmaker, writer and art gallery director.

Education
Teresa Grimes grew up in the Notting Hill Gate area of West London where she attended Holland Park Comprehensive School.

While studying at the University of East Anglia, Grimes was a founding member of Cinewomen with Ginette Vincendeau, a group who organised the Norwich Women’s Film Weekend. This was a two-day annual event that ran for ten years from 1979 to 1989 at Cinema City in Norwich and became the longest lasting women’s film festival in the UK.

At UEA, Grimes researched BBS, the small production company that was responsible for such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Two-Lane Blacktop, and The Last Picture Show. Grimes argued that BBS represented a moment in the development of American cinema in which there was a shift towards the production of films that were personal and subjective, “involved in exploring not a mythic ‘Hollywood’ version of America, but a more palpable image of the individual within a specific milieu.”

Career
Grimes worked as a part-time Lecturer in Film Studies at Bulmershe College in Reading, moved back to London in 1984 and started working in the television and film industry. This included several long stints at Thames Television in Euston Road where she worked on Take Six Cooks, one of the first television series to focus on chefs and their cooking styles.

In the 1980s, she worked on a diverse range of programmes and films as an editor and researcher, later becoming a director/producer. In 1989 she directed three of the five episodes in the Channel 4/Arts Council series Five Women Painters. She co-wrote and edited the accompanying book. The series and book focused on the 20th-century British artists Eileen Agar, Dora Carrington, Nina Hamnett, Laura Knight and Winifred Nicholson.

She produced Stephen Brown’s short film Breathing (1992), starring Charlotte Coleman who won the Silver Hugo for Best Actress at the Chicago Film Festival. She directed Ebb Tide (1993), written by Tony Grisoni, and produced by Stephen Brown.

Grimes directed Esterhazy, a play for Radio 4, produced by Sweet Talk Productions and broadcast in June 2006. Esterhazy was nominated for the 2007 Imison Award.

She founded the contemporary art gallery Tintype in 2010 with co-director Pat Treasure, and became sole director in 2013. Originally in Shoreditch, the gallery moved to the Hatton Garden/Clerkenwell area of central London in 2011 and then to a permanent home in Essex Road, Islington in 2013.

Tintype ran an annual programme of commissioned moving image work under the umbrella title of "Essex Road", which ran from 2014 to 2020. Artists and filmmakers who participated in "Essex Road" include Ayo Akingbade, David Blandy, Jordan Baseman, Suki Chan, Adam Chodzko, Jem Cohen, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Benedict Drew, Tony Grisoni, Andrew Kötting, Melanie Manchot, Ruth Maclennan, Uriel Orlow, John Smith, Richard Wentworth, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Penny Woolcock, Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Tintype closed in 2020.

Filmography

 * Five Women Painters (1989), series (5 épisodes) produced for the Arts Council in association with Channel Four Television:
 * Episode 1: "Winifred Nicholson: Not Nailed Down"
 * Episode 2: "Carrington"
 * Episode 4: "Fast and Furious: The Life and Times of Nina Hamnett"


 * Breathing (1992)


 * Ebb Tide (1993)


 * Semaphore (1998)


 * Bootstrapped (2015)

Personal life
Teresa Grimes is the daughter of Academy Award winning production designer Stephen Grimes and granddaughter of the cartoonist Leslie Grimes. The artist Oona Grimes is her sister.