Melissa Friedling
Associate Professor of Filmmaking
Email
friedlim@newschool.edu
Office Location
D - 79 Fifth Avenue
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Profile
Friedling is a film and media artist, scholar, and educator interested in complex processes, systems, intervals, and the relational jumble of human and more-than-human matter. Much of her work begins with found or ‘happened upon’ artifacts that prompts an excavation of the marginalized and sometimes metaphysical narratives contained within them. Her creative work has been selected for numerous international festivals and has also been presented in galleries and museums including PS1 MoMA (NY,NY), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo, NY), The Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Athens, GA), and Apex Art (NY,NY). She has been a fellow at Yaddo and the International Studio and Curatorial Program and is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts. In 2006, she also founded the web video production company, Slouch Productions. In addition, her writing on film, art, and culture has been published widely including essays in Flash Art International, Afterimage, and Discourse and a book, Recovering Women: Rhetoric, Feminisms, and Addiction (Westview Press, 2000). She has been teaching courses in film and video production and media studies at the New School since 2004. Overall, she teaches with an eye towards a reflective media artist who is not just trained to perform a series of technical skills, but who can also see the big picture, use techniques and tools critically and purposefully, and is appreciative of a wide range of film traditions and modes.
Degrees Held
Ph.D. Rhetorical Studies. University of Iowa.
Performances and Appearances
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Video Design + Projection for theater production, All My Fathers at LaMaMa Experimental Theater (NY,NY), 2019.
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Video Design + Projection for theater production, Faust 3 at Judson Memorial Church (NY, NY) 2017.
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Midwood Before Hollywood Pop-Up Museum. 2015-2019.
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Balcony Scene 2010 (with Paul David Young and Franklin Evans), HD video with live performance, approximately 22 minutes, 2010
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Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot, 16mm, 4:30 minutes, 2010
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McCabe, 16mm transferred to digital video, 6:43 minute loop, 2007
Research Interests
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Re-purposed and residual media
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Experimental film practices
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Digital filmmaking
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Media archeology
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Media and the environment
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Experimental animation
Awards And Honors
Finishing fund grant from NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre. 2020.
Yaddo Residency Fellowship. 2020.