Love Stories My Grandmother Tells

Dana Plays is an award winning experimental filmmaker, digital artist and professor of Film and Media Arts, in the College of Arts and Letters at The University of Tampa. Her work has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition The Color of Ritual, The Color of Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America 1930-2000, programmed by Whitney curator by Chrissie Isles, as well as other notable venues including the Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque and more than 50 international film festivals where her films have garnered 25 film festival awards. Plays’ work consists of a variety of approaches to experimental documentary and the visual film, utilizing optically printed found footage and/or footage that she has shot.

Exquisit Corpses is part of Plays’ ongoing Salvage Paradigm Series consisting of works involving the manipulation of found footage she pulled out of dumpsters, and involves the reworking of historic archival footage re-photographed by Plays with her now digital optical printer. The series consists of five award winning short films, Exquisit Corpses (2011 Pacific Atlantic Prize at the Festival of the Moving Image); Rhizome (2007, 14:00, Honorable Mention, Black Maria Film and Video Festival); Nuclear Family (2001, 21:00, First Prize Juror’s Choice Award Black Maria Film Festival); Zero Hour, (1992, 30:00, Tom Berman Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival); as well as digital installation pieces Salvage Paradigm (2005, 30:00); Archival Extracts Series (2008, 7:00, for two screens), Exquisit Corpses (2010, 23:47, for two screens).

Plays is also completing a feature experimental historical biography of her great aunt Ottilie Moore, The Sausage King’s Daughter, expected 2012, that follows in the trajectory of her postmodernist films involving historical events, of women in her family, and an exploration of past and present, including Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, (1994) (Best documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival, Women in the Director’s Chair, Viper International Festival, televised on VPRO Dutch National Television, WNET Chicago, with screenings in experimental venues including, Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque).

Plays films involving her exploration of the domestic sphere, also involve a series of short film she made while raising two young sons in the 1980s and 90s, in which they, and/or other children, appear. These include films that tackle subjects such as young girls pre-pubescent flirtation (Don’t Means Do, 1983), childhood involvement in complicity in parents’ infidelity (Via Rio, 16mm, 1986) to illusory visual poetic interweaves of memory, with metaphorical reference to birth and death (Recollection, 16mm, 1991) as well as optically printed footage with optically printed traveling mattes (Silverfish, 16mm, 1981, Sinking Creek Film Festival Award winner).

Plays lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for twenty years, where she was involved in the experimental film, music, theater and art scene, while attending California College of the Arts, where she received two degrees, BFA (1978) in General Fine Arts exploring photography printmaking and film, and MFA in Film and Video (1986), and while also working at the San Francisco Art Institute (1984-1990). In the 1990s she taught in Syracuse University, and later at Occidental College, in Los Angeles (1996-2004), prior to her appointment at The University of Tampa (2005 to the present).