Virtual Women Filmmakers Festival at SAAM: Prelude to Musical Thinking 

March 2023

A close up of a white woman's ear is seen from behind in a dimly lit room with purple hues.

Join the Smithsonian American Art Museum for our fifth annual Women Filmmakers Festival. This year, the festival is presented exclusively online in March in honor of Women’s History Month. This programming also serves as prelude to Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, an upcoming exhibition that highlights how film and video artists incorporate musical strategies, themes and references into their work. This year's highlighted filmmakers, Vivienne Dick and Alison O'Daniel, consistently bring this same synergy to their cinematic offerings. 

Attendees are encouraged to ask the following questions: How does music communicate and create community? How do changes in our surroundings and in ourselves impact the soundscapes of our lives? How do relationships to people, formed through music, and relationships to sounds and sense, evolve?

Alison O'Daniel

Portrait of the artist Alison O’Daniel

Vivienne Dick

Filmmaker Vivienne Dick, a older woman with grey bob and bangs, stares out with slight smile

Alison O'Daniel

Alison O’Daniel (b. 1979, Miami, FL) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work appears around the world in exhibitions and screenings. Employing various approaches to moving image, sculpture, installation and sound, her practice explores embodiment and layers of translation, communication, and access. 

Virtual Film Screening with Artist Alison O’Daniel

Vivienne Dick

Vivienne Dick (b. 1950, Donegal, Ireland) is an internationally celebrated filmmaker and artist, credited as both “one of the most important filmmakers Ireland has produced” and the defining moving image artist of the No Wave era in New York.  Her experimental feminist films explore the catalytic convergences of urban and creative life, sexual politics, and self-presentation— and more recently, climate change, capitalism, and relationships of reciprocity in the digital age.  

Virtual Film Screening with Filmmaker Vivienne Dick

Watch the Trailer for "New York Our Time"