WOMEN OF VISION profiles a variety of women active in independent-feminist film and video, including production, distribution and education, whose work expresses a variety of political and esthetic viewpoints.
The three-part video includes ""Creating an Infrastructure,"" which profiles six women whose careers began in the Fifties and Sixties; ""Mothers, Lovers and Mentors,"" on six women whose work coincided with the emergence of the women's movement in the Seventies; and ""Reassembly Required,"" which interviews six women whose careers began in the Eighties and Nineties.
Women of Vision highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50’s to the 90’s. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto-Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.
Interviewees: Pearl Bowser; Margaret Caples; Michelle Citron; Megan Cunningham; Cheryl Dunye; Barbara Hammer; Kate Horsfield; Carol Leigh; Susan Mogul; Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski; Frances Negrón-Muntaner; Eve Oishi; Constance Penley; Wendy Quinn; Julia Reichert; Carolee Schneemann; Valerie Soe; Victoria Vesna and Yvonne Welbon. A book of transcribed interviews and introduction to feminist film history available from U MN Press: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/women-of-vision. The project was revisited for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories, co-edited with Angela Agauyo, ""Informed Historical Reveries,"" Fall 2019: https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/issue/5/4.
All interview tapes conducted for this project are archived at the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project including research meetings with scores of media feminists held in NY, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She has directed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), Dear Gabe (2003) and Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998), and the shorts RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). She is the producer of the shorts DiAna's Hair Ego Remix (Dunye and Ellen Spiro, 2017), Bad Bosses Go to Hell (Erin Cramer, 1997) and I Want to Leave a Legacy: The video/activism of Juanita Mohammed Szczepasnki (Juanita Szczepanski, 2023). Dr. Juhasz is the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. Her work as an activist videomaker began in 1987 with three tapes for GMHC's Living with AIDS cable show: Women and AIDS (1987 with Jean Carlomusto), Prostitutes, Risk, and AIDS (1988) and A Test for the Nation: Women, Children, Families, AIDS (1988). The collectively made We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS (The Women's AIDS Video Enterprise, 1990) has maintained an active profile in activist circles. Dr. Juhasz writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work attends to fake news, poetry, online feminist pedagogy, YouTube, and more.
