The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant that will be awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art.
Image by Eric McNatt for the 2017 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project
“It has been the goal of my life to put a lesbian lifestyle on the screen. Why? Because when I started I couldn’t find any! ...I picked up a camera in the 60s, late 60s, made Super 8, 8mm, finally went to school and got a 16mm camera. Made 13 films in two and a half years. All experimental. Because I think that as a lesbian at that time I was living an experimental lifestyle. Well let’s just say, I was experimenting. And I still am. And I think that lesbian film really calls out for experimental work. ...Working as a lesbian filmmaker in the 70s wasn’t easy in the social structure — the educational institution that I was in. It was difficult. And I want this grant to make it easier for lesbians of today. So you can make work that you want to make.”
— Barbara Hammer
ABOUT
The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. Work can be experimental animation, experimental documentary, experimental narrative, cross-genre, or solely experimental. Applicants must be based in the U.S. This grant was established by Hammer in 2017 to give needed support to moving-image art made by lesbians. The grant is supported directly by funds provided by Hammer’s estate and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. This year, Queer|Art is pleased to announce the grant increased to $7,000.
Applications for the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant were open September 1st - November 1st.
RRAINE HANSON WINS FOURTH ANNUAL
BARBARA HAMMER LESBIAN EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING GRANT
Queer|Art is excited to announce the winner of the 2020 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, Rraine Hanson. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker will receive a $7,000 cash grant, as well as studio visits with members of the judges panel in support of their creative and professional development.
Rraine Hanson (she/they/he) is a queer, gender-nonconforming, Jamaican filmmaker, most interested in utilizing design and mixed media to tell stories centering the experiences and imaginations of queer and trans people of colour. They hold a BA in Media Production from Emerson College, where they debuted their thesis film, The Divine Femmunity. Since then, the film has been screened at the 2019 Queer Woman of Colour Film Festival, art exhibitions in South Florida, drive-in programming in Los Angeles, as well as online through the work of organizations like The Woven Colours and the Fronteiras Collective. When they’re not obsessing over new ways to experiment with their own storytelling, they work in the television world helping art departments
build all kinds of different worlds. The hands on crafting experience informs the methodology behind all their personal creative endeavors, both written and visual.
This year’s judging panel remarks, “Rraine's work is very unique. Their tactile analog approach and use of space and the in-between moments are especially exciting. Their exploratory strategies of representation are reminiscent of Barbara and we're really excited to see Mid Autumn come into fruition. Rraine is a filmmaker with a voice that is super fresh and it's clear that they are trying to carve out their own place.”
Hanson was one of 148 applicants hailing from 24 different states who applied for the Hammer Grant in its fourth year, winning for a project currently entitled Mid Autumn. Hanson’s project is a reflective meditation on gender identity and the confinement within cisheteronormative binaries, visualized through the gaze of a queer teenager upon their school teacher and her life. As the childhood memory unfolds, the story explores the blurred lines between influence, desire and obsession.
A Series of Firsts (2019)
The Divine Femmunity (2018)
Her Blue Body Full of Light (2018)
It's Not Just Hair (2018)
2020 BARBARA HAMMER GRANT FINALISTS
2020 HAMMER GRANT JUDGES
From left to right: Gelare Khoshgozaran, image courtesy of artist; Tiona Nekkia McClodden, image by Texas Isaiah; Deborah Stratman, image courtesy of artist
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist who, in 2009 was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics were discussed in endless summers. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Human Resources, Visitor Welcome Center, Articule (Montreal), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Pori Art Museum (Finland) and Yarat Contemporary Art Space (Baku, Azerbaijan). She was the recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2015), an Art Matters Award (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), and the Graham Foundation Award (2020). Her words have appeared in contemptorary (co-founding editor), The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, X-TRA, The Enemy, Art Practical, Ajam Media Collective, The LA Review of Books and MARCH, among others.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work often employs a citational practice exploring and critiquing issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. Her interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. McClodden has exhibited and screened work at the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Whitney Museum; MOCA LA; MCA Chicago; MoMA PS1; among others. She has been awarded the 2019 Bucksbaum Award - McClodden was chosen from among the seventy-five artists whose works are being presented in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. McClodden has been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, the 2018–19 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, among other awards. McClodden curated the traveling exhibitions A Recollection. + Predicated. featured within Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental, and more recently There Are No Shadows Here: The Perfect Moment at 30. She lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA.
Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, mineral evolution, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum (LA), Witte de With (Rotterdam), PS1 (NY), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Yerba Buena Center (SF), MCA (Chicago), Whitney Biennial (NY) and has done site-specific projects with venues including the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Hallwalls, Mercer Union and Ballroom Marfa. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, True/False, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, the Flaherty and Docs Kingdom. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins Fellowships, an Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
ABOUT BARBARA HAMMER
Barbara Hammer sorting through her archive by Vanessa Haroutunian
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) began making films in the 1970s. She is most well-known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change, often through an exploration of the materiality of the filmmaking process and its relationship to the body’s potential as subject, form, author, and screen. She has been honored with seven retrospectives, including a forthcoming exhibition later this year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Previous retrospectives took place at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway, and The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.
MEET OUR GRANT MANAGER
Image by Sam Richardson
Vanessa Haroutunian (they/she) is a queer producer, artist, and curator. She received her B.A. in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College, and received the Jerome B. Hill Award for Documentary Excellence for their thesis film. Haroutunian recently produced three short films written and directed by queer female identified filmmakers: Erin Greenwell, whose debut feature My Best Day premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Heather María Ács, whose short film Flu$h screened at Outfest and Newfest, and Ariel Mahler whose short trans-thriller Flock is currently being developed into a feature with Haroutunian attached to produce. Ács and Haroutunian’s short film Flourish premiered at Outfest Fusion LGBTQ People of Color Film Festival and was selected for Outfest’s “United in Pride” Festival in 2020. Haroutunian is currently in post-production on a feature documentary, shot over 20 years, about the LGBTQ+ community in Cuba, and a short film entitled Blue starring two transgender leads that has been supported by InsideOut’s Re:Focus Fund. Haroutunian’s goal is to produce films that fill the gaps in the film industry, creating opportunities for diversity, inclusivity, and intersectionality in front of and behind the camera. From 2013-2018 they were the Programs & Operations Coordinator at Queer|Art, where they currently manage the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. Haroutunian has curated a moving image program in conjunction with the Hammer Grant since its inception and in 2019 the program entitled “The Hammer Mix: Decades'' screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
HAMMER GRANT ARCHIVE
2019
2018
2017