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 Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and the Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. In 2025, she received the Anonymous Was A Woman grant award and, in 2024, the Stan Brakhage Vision Award for expanded the boundaries of personal cinema. She has recieved grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation and numerous film festivals in the USA and internationally. 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. She currently lives in Minnesota.

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 in a backyard, a deserted housing project, a grassland or a rough sea.

My most recent projects are Monster in Me (2025) and A Parable of Now (2025)

Monster in Me (2025) is a contemporary fairy tale told by a woman who asks herself the question, "How did I come out of this unbroken?"

A Parable of Now (2025) is a visual poem about environmental fears and their impact on the state of innocence and childhood in today’s world.

In the past few years, there has been lively internet exposure for my dark1983 musical murder story, Possibly in Michigan, that I made with singer/songwriter/composer Karen Skladany and Jill Sands whose roles were much larger than just their roles playing Janice and Sharon. The media attention began in 2015, when an excerpt from Possibly in Michigan made the front page of Reddit. In the summer of 2019, a15 second clip from one of the songs was posted on TikTok with thousands of iterations. Now there are over 16 million views with its popularity spreading out onto my other works that have many thousands of views.