Awards
BARBARA HAMMER: Artist Quotes and Awards
“I choose film and video as a medium to make the invisible, visible. Anyone can be left out of history. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. A multi-level cinema that engages them viscerally and intellectually activates my audiences. I want people to leave the theater with fresh perceptions and emboldened to take active and political stances for social change in a global environment.”
Barbara Hammer is an internationally recognized film artist who has made over 90 films/videos for which she received the prestigious Frameline Award for making a significant contribution to lesbian and gay cinema. Her trilogy of experimental documentaries on lesbian and gay histories is already considered classic cinema: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000).
In The Exploding Eye, A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema, Wheeler Winston Dixon writes:
“Hammer’s intense productivity places her on the scale of Brakhage or Warhol as a major force in the independent cinema; Hammer neatly inverts the patriarchal forces implicitly and often “invisibly” at work in independent cinema practice.”
Selected Feature Essay & Personal Documentaries
Nitrate Kisses 1992 premiered Sundance & Toronto Film Festival
Tender Fictions 1995 premiered Sundance & Forum, Berlinale
History Lessons 2000 premiered The Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco
Devotion, A Fim about Ogawa Productions 2000, premiered Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival
My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities, 2000 Sundance Channel
Resisting Paradise, 2003 Sundance Channel
Retrospectives
1985 Centre Pompidou, Paris
1991 Retrospective: Film Forum, Directors Guild of American, Los Angeles
1992 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln
1994 Out in South Africa Film Festival., Johannesburg/Cape Town/Durban
1998 Immaginaria Women’s Film Festival, Italy
2006 Turin International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Italy
2007 Chinese Culture University, Taiwan
2010 Museum of Modern Art New York
Selected Grants and Fellowships
2000 Creative Capital for Resisting Paradise
1997 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow Award in Film
1999 Camargo Foundation Residency
1999 Art Matters Grant in Film Production & Arts Link Travel Grant to Ukraine
2000 Creative Capital for Resisting Paradise
2000 The Japan Foundation & Artist Fellowship N.Y.State Council on the Arts Film Prod.
Selected Juror
1993 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
1994 Sundance Film Festival
Selected Honors
Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials (’85, ’93, ’95)
Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobes (’85, ’91, ’95, ’98)
Polar Bear Award, Berlin International Film Festival Sundance, Toronto, Berlin (1993)
Frameline Award, Frameline International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2000)
Shirley Clarke Avant-garde Filmmaking Award, NYWFT (2006)
LEO Award for Outstanding Contribution to Film, Flaherty Seminars (2008)
Teddy Award, Berlinale, Best Short Film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor (2009)