Barbara Hammer is an award-winning visual artist working primarily in film and video. She is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality. Her multileveled cinema reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not otherwise been told, engaging viewers viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change.

Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, Hammer became a pioneer of queer cinema, exploring lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history. “It is a political act to work and speak as a lesbian artist in the dominant art world and to speak as an avant-garde artist to a lesbian and gay audience,” Hammer says. “My presence and voice address both issues of homophobia and the need for an emerging community to explore a new imagination.”

Over her long and distinguished career, Hammer has made more than 80 moving- image works, including Dyketactics, Jane Brakhage, Pond and Waterfall, Nitrate Kisses, Tender Fictions, and Welcome to This House. She has also received numerous honors and awards and has had major retrospectives and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Tate Modern in London, among others.

Barbara Hammer will be presented with the 2018 Stan Brakhage Vision Award
at 7:00pm on Sunday, November 4, at the Sie FilmCenter. A reception follows in her honor.