BIOGRAPHY

About the Artist

Since 1981, Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous film festival awards, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She’s a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was the director of the graduate program in film for 30-years.

Artist Statement

I consider myself a storyteller working within the psychological landscape of contemporary fairy tales, dreams and poetry. I explore archetypal themes where my characters are often shaped by violence, basic cold-heartedness and trauma. The last few years, I find myself leaning towards creating works that consider the frailty of an environmentally vulnerable world and our place in it. This world might be located in a small county park, a backyard, a deserted housing project or a snow-covered rock.

In the artifial entanglement of AI, as portrayed in my recently completed video AI and I (2021), a woman interrogates the nature of consciousness, as she walks through the woods, dragging electrical cords behind her like bread crumbs.

I am currently working with a vertical three-channel video installation about the dizzying tension we carry around about the future, time and the planet. Filmed mostly under water, this triptych is not a straight-forward narrative, but a visual poem with many possible meanings and interpretations. In part, it represents my reaction to the crisis of environmental change and our uncertain futures. At the same time, embodied in the work is also a meditation on the state of innocence and childhood which seems to have been abandoned to a troubled world. The children and other victims are left to take only small steps towards tackling the big problems of the care and well-being of our planet.

In the past few years, there has been internet exposure for my 1983 musical murder story, Possibly in Michigan that I made with singer/songwriter/composer Karen Skladany. It began one week in 2015, where an excerpt from Possibly in Michigan was on the front page of Reddit. Its YouTube exposure built until the summer of 2019 when a 15 second clip from one of the songs was posted on the online performance app TikTok. With well over 10 million views, Possibly in Michigan has been traveling by way of YouTube’s vast algorithm, and its presence spreading out onto my other works that have many thousands of views each.