Biography



Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized visual/performance artist and experimental filmmaker, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of ambiguity, and its strength of design.  One of the pioneers in the renaissance of American avant-garde object performance, Geiser has, for two decades, created innovative, hypnotic works which integrate puppets and performing objects with film and video. “Geiser shares with filmmakers such as Jan Svankmajer the rare ability to make children’s toys and seemingly innocent objects … resonate with the most unsettling, arcane, and adult fears.  Better still, Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.”  (Holly Willis, Res, 2004)   She was recognized in the LA Weekly’s 2006 State of the Arts as one of 100 significant Los Angeles Artists. 


Geiser began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performances and installations.  Her experimental films evolved as separate works for screening and for installations, while continuing to evolve as elements of her interdisciplinary performances. Her films have been screened at Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Redcat, and SFMOMA, among others.  Her films have premiered five times at the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde”. Other screenings include the Toronto Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the San Francisco Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London International Film Festival, Taipei's Women Make Waves Festival, AFI, the Sundance Channel, REEL NY, and other PBS venues.  The first “episode” of her 8-episode film Magnetic Sleep was presented as a work-in-progress at the Getty Museum in October 2006.  Geiser also created the puppets for Oscar Award-winning director Jessica Yu's documentary Protagonist, which premiered at the IFC Center in 2007. Three of Geiser's films are in MOMA’s film collection. The New York Public Library has collected all of her films, and The Archive of the Academy of Motion Pictures has just selected her body of work for preservation in their archive of experimental films.

 

A Guggenheim Fellow, Janie Geiser’s performances have been presented nationally and internationally, and she has been recognized with an Obie Award, two Bessie Awards, NEA Fellowships, a Rockefeller Media Artisi Fellowship, a Pew/TCG grant, and funding from Creative Capitol, the Henson Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, Arts at St. Ann’s, Dance Theater Workshop, the Public Theater, Redcat, MOCA, PS122, HERE, and at the Henson Festival of Puppet Theater.  Geiser’s collaboration with Vic Chesnutt, Josiah Meigs and Me, premiered at Arts at St Ann’s in 2001, and her diorama performance Evidence of Floods was presented at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in 2002. She has collaborated with playwright Erik Ehn on Invisible Glass, which premiered at Redcat in 2005, and Frankenstein (Mortal Toys) (co-directed with Susan Simpson), which recently performed to sold-out audiences in Los Angeles and New York.  She received a 2006 City of Los Angeles Visual Artist Fellowship for her installation The Spiders Wheels.  Her peepshow/installation/performance The Reptile Under the Flowers was presented as a work-in-progress at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in August 2008, and premiered in May 2009 as a co-presentation of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Automata in Los Angeles.



Geiser is also a nationally recognized illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.  Her book The Tornado Treaty is in the Artists Book Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  



Geiser is Co-Artistic Director of Automata, a Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to the creation, incubation, and presentation of experimental puppet theater, experimental film, and other contemporary art practices centered on ideas of artifice and performing objects. Geiser is also the Director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts, one of the rare programs in the US for the study of experimental object performance and installation.