Biographie
Dana Plays, a Baltimore, Maryland native, is a filmmaker and digital artist renowned for her award-winning documentary and experimental films showcased worldwide. She first picked up a camera at age 9 during a holiday in the West Indies. At 15, she began serious photography studies, learning to use a 35mm SLR camera, developing negatives, and printing her own photos. Later, she relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, earning both Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the California College of the Arts, where she launched her filmmaking and digital art career. Immersed in the Bay Area's fine art community, Plays created a series of experimental films that she personally shot and edited, embracing a hands-on approach to realize her unique vision.
Her filmography includes 31 works spanning film and digital video, covering documentaries, experimental films, and installations. Plays' work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Color of Ritual, Color of Women, Avant-Garde Women Filmmakers of the Twentieth Century exhibitions, and over 50 international film festivals such as Edinburgh, Montreal Nouveau, and Seattle International Film Festivals. She has received more than 25 film festival awards, including the First Prize Jurors' Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival for Nuclear Family; the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Experimental Film at the Houston International Festival for Across the Border; and Best Documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, which also aired on VPRO, a Dutch national TV network. Since 2005, her accolades include a Black Maria Film Festival award, a solo retrospective at First Person Cinema in Boulder, CO—the longest-running American independent film showcase—a digital installation of Salvage Paradigm at San Francisco’s Play Space Gallery, and a digital installation alongside her video montage River Madness, featuring Hollywood films set in the Los Angeles River, at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. She currently serves on the board of directors for Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.
Plays is a professor of Film and Media Arts and Women's Studies at The University of Tampa, where she has taught all facets of film and digital production and studies since 1990. Her prior teaching roles include appointments at Syracuse University and Occidental College. At The University of Tampa, she instructs courses in experimental, documentary, and narrative filmmaking, world cinema, independent film and video, and women's studies.
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