User:Whcohen/Donna cameron

Donna Cameron is an American artist, photographer, author, film director, and inventor. She is best known for the invention of paper-emulsion cinematic film. Her films, photography and videos are represented in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Early Life and Education

Cameron was born in Mishawaka, IN, and was raised between New York City and New London, Connecticut. Her father Donald P. Cameron was a pharmaceutical drug designer and organic chemist, and her mother Carmela was a biologist and educator.

Cameron moved to Chicago to earn a BFA in Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), graduating in 1980. Eventually she moved back to New York and earned a master’s degree (MPS) at New York University's Inter-Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2009 and an MA in New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies in 2019 at the Tisch School of the Arts. During her time at SAIC, Cameron worked with noted American media artists Robert Breer, George Landow, and Robert Heineken and was at one time a projectionist for the filmmaker/lecturer Stan Brakhage. Cameron as also studied at The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), learning black and white photography with American photographer Harry Callahan and intaglio with Swiss artist Dadi Wirz. In addition, she acquired impressionist landscape painting techniques in Paris, France in the Atelier Ferdinand Herbo with French master seascape painter Ferdinand Herbo. At The Art Students League of New York she received two scholarships to study with noted American painters Richard Poussette-Dart and Marshall Glazer, protégé of German expressionist George Grosz’.

Career:

Cameron was first noted for her “lyric poetic” cinema and her invention of a paper fiber film emulsion technology, which she has employed in over 30 films and four portfolios of photography since 1970.

In 2001, The United States Patent Office awarded Cameron a patent for her invention of "Cinematic Paper Emulsion" (CPE). She has been referenced in the Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas, The Chicago Tribune by Bill Stamets, and the Reading Eagle by Tony Lucia, among others for the invention.

Cameron’s independent film work is supported and distributed by the Museum of Modern Art, NY Department of Film and Media’s Circulating Film Library, as well as Canyon Cinema, the Film–Makers’ Cooperative, NY and Lightcone film distributors in Paris, France.

In the 90’s, Cameron explored documentary filmmaking with Confidential Do Not Duplicate, a film about the 1987 unsolved murder of her youngest sister, PFC. Beth Ann Cameron. Drawing on her experience as a professional journalist for the Miami Herald, the film was released in 1991. This film premiered at MoMA’s “What’s Happening Series” and is also accessible in the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media Collection of the Bobst Library at NYU. Prior to this, Cameron directed thirteen short experimental films, including TygerTyger (1991), which was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA) NY Film Archive in New York. Other Cameron titles purchased for the MoMA Film Archive collection and for the MoMA Circulating Film Library include Fauve (1990) with original music by Peter Wetzler; NYC/Joshua Tree (1991), with original music by Don Militello; Autumn Leaves (1994) with original music by Gian Andrea Tabacchi; Jazz Elegy (2000), and Projector (2005) both with music by Mark Stewart, and voice by Andrew Sloan, Brokn Bridge and LIFEtranspo (2011), both with music by Samir W. Zarif. Her work was recommended by a committee of scholars and curators to the MoMA Circulating Film Library in 1990, and continues to be collected and represented in its archives.

Career

From 1987-1991, Cameron produced and directed a noted feature length experimental multimedia portrait of American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, with whom she worked on Clarke's request. The work, “Shirley Clarke In Our Time” premiered at the Museum Of Modern Art in 1994 and selected for representation by The Museum of Modern Art Circulating Film and Video Library in 1995. In June 2000, Shirley Clarke in Our Time was featured in the MoMA's Millennial Show Making Choices: MoMA 2000.

The film, made originally on 16mm and 3/4" U-matic video and mastered on 1-inch video, was re-mastered in 2011 on a DVD that celebrates Clarke's legacy in

American Cinema by New American Cinema founder Jonas Mekas, also a contemporary of Clarke's.

Cameron's CPE film Fauve was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Millennial show, “The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought: Women In Avant-Garde Film in America”.

At the 53rd Venice Biennalle, Cameron's CPE films and documentaries were featured, collected by the MoMA Circulating Film Library and the MoMA Film Study Center con latere at the Ca Rezzonico.

Cameron co-directed and edited a documentary with Spanish- American artist- filmmaker Angel Orensanz, “The Orensanz Portfolio”, a film about Oresanz’ international art exhibitions. “The Orensanz Portfolio” was added to the MoMA’s Circulating Film Library collection in 2005.

Other noted Cameron avant-garde documentaries in the MoMA collection include Thunderbolt (2000), a live video dialogue with the late painter, sculptor and educator, Vivienne Thaul Wechter. Thunderbolt was screened at the MoMA and at the NYU Directors Series Program the same year.

Midway through the decade, Cameron released P.G. Titus (2006) and Eppe’s Song, a pair of documentary moving image studies of the life and family history of Italian sculptor Eppe Tito.

Cameron has taught at a variety of universities and schools, including The New School University (filmmaking) and the School of Visual Arts (Computer Thesis Production). She has written and taught several original courses for New York University, including the first multimedia production workshop in the Department of Film and Television, the first video for photographers workshop in The Department of Photography and Imaging, and the first video profiles humanities course in portraiture in the Department of Open Arts, all at NYU’ Tisch School of the Arts.

Today, Cameron teaches media art production and aesthetics at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Open Arts.

Personal Life:

Cameron lives in between Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York and Arlington, Virginia with her husband, Phillip E. Sloan, a photographer. They have one son, Andrew C. Sloan, also a filmmaker. She is a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees.