CAST

BARBARA HAMMER, a pioneer in queer cinema, has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years. Hammer’s films of the 1970’s are the first made by an openly lesbian American filmmaker to explore lesbian identity, desire and sexuality though avant-garde strategies. Her first feature film Nitrate Kisses was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Hammer was honored with a month long retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010.

SU FRIEDRICH has directed twenty-four films and videos since 1978, which have been featured in eighteen retrospectives at major museums and film festivals, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. The films have been widely screened at film festivals, universities and art centers, have been extensively written about, and have won numerous awards, including Grand Prix for Sink or Swim at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

ROSE TROCHE is a Puerto Rican-American filmmaker whose independent film directorial debut, Go Fish (1994), a romantic comedy about lesbians in Chicago, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Teddy award at the Berlin International Film Festival.  She was also a director and writer for the Showtime series The L Word, a show about lesbian friends living in Los Angeles.

B. RUBY RICH is an American scholar, critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films, and a professor of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz.  Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term New Queer Cinema. She is currently the Editor of Film Quarterly, the scholarly film journal published by UC Press.

DESIREE AKHAVAN is an Iranian-American film director, producer, screenwriter and actress based in New York. She is best known for her 2014 feature film debut, Appropriate Behavior which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Written and directed by Desiree Akhavan, the film stars Akhavan as Shirin, a bisexual Persian American woman in Brooklyn struggling to rebuild her life after breaking up with her girlfriend. Her film The Miseducation of Cameron Post premiered at Sundance in 2018.

SARAH SHULMAN is a novelist, playwright and lesbian rights activist. In 1987, Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now called MIX and in its twenty-ninth year. In fall 2009, Schulman and Cheryl Dunye wrote the screenplay for Dunye's film The Owls, starring Guinevere Turner, Lisa Gornick, Cheryl Dunye, and V.S. Brodie. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in January 2010. She is co-producer with Jim Hubbard of his feature-length documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, opening night of Documentary Fortnight.

CHERYL DUNYE emerged as part of the 1990's "queer new wave" of young film and video makers. Dunye has made over 15 films including Mommy is Coming, The Owls, My Baby's Daddy, and HBO’s Stranger Inside which garnered her an Independent Spirit award nomination for best director. Her debut film, The Watermelon Woman, was awarded the Teddy at the Berlinale in 1996 and was recently restored by Outfest’s UCLA Legacy Project for the films’ 20th anniversary. Dunye has received numerous awards and honors for her work including a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.