Suzie Silver

Professor of Art

Suzie Silver has been creating queer performance and video art for more than two decades. A true tomboy and thrill-seeker from day one, her youth was spent dirt-biking through deserts and canyons, attending punk shows and dancing in the queer bars of San Diego. Her well known early videos, Freebird and A Spy emerged from her involvement with the performance art scene in Chicago in the late 80s and early 90s. Her later videos employ digital collage to meld together appropriated images and music, recorded performance and animated sequences into irreverent celebrations of exoticism, ecstasy and camp. Her love of science fiction and her life-long commitment to imagining divergent desires lead her to instigate the book/DVD project Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities. Her current projects include: Trans-Q Television a playful and provocative, collaboratively created, video variety show celebrating the multiplicities of genders and sexualities; and with Hilary Harp, Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale video series for queers of all ages (and their friends, too). All of Silver’s work alludes to the capacity for desire to disrupt social boundaries and imagine new futures.

Her work has exhibited and screened widely nationally and internationally at venues including: The Whitney Museum of Art, The New Museum, Documenta, ICA Boston, ICA London, Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, London Film Festival, Seoul Film Festival, and Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festivals all over the world including Melbourne, London, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, Sao Paulo, Auckland and many more.

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