Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut. She attended the University of Chicago in 1971-72 and Oberlin College from 1972-1975, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Art and Art History. Since 1976 she has lived and worked in New York. Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced twelve 16mm films. She is the writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist and editor of almost all her films, which range in length from 10 to 65 minutes. All of the films but one were produced in black & white. In 1993, Friedrich co-directed and co-edited a one-hour videotape with Janet Baus entitled “The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too,” which documents the first year of an activist group. Su Friedrich’s films have won many awards including Best Narrative Film at the Athens Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for “Hide and Seek”; for “Sink or Swim, “the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, the Gold Juror’s Choice Award at the Charlotte Film and Video Festival, the Special Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival and the Best Experimental Film Award at the USA Short Film and Video Festival; for “Damned If You Don’t,” the Best Experimental Film Award at the Athens Film Festival and the Best Experimental Narrative Award at the Atlanta Film Festival. Friedrich’s work is widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe. Since 1983, Su Friedrich has made personal appearances at over 125 one-person shows. Her work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, the First Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Friedrich’s films have also been broadcast on various stations across the U.S. plus Channel 5 in Vancouver and SBS-TV in Australia. Su Friedrich is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Alpert Award (1996), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1990), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1989) and a DAAD grant as artist-in-residence in Berlin (1984). Her work is in the collections of the Museum Of Modern Art (NYC), the Art Institute of Chicago, the New York Public Library, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Library of Australia, as well as many university libraries. Friedrich is a part-time teacher of film production in New York at Millennium Film Workshop and the New School for Social Research, and has curated several film shows at Millennium and at Kino Arsenal in Berlin.