Filmmakers

Haley Ausserer is a queer femme California girl living in Nashville , Tennessee . She is a writer, a videomaker, and a high noon Leo. She works with seniors and volunteers in the video archive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Film: "Letters to Dolly"

 

Inge Blackman is a filmmaker, writer and film programmer living and working in East London, United Kingdom. She has directed several documentaries for British television including "BD Women," a stylized documentary about blacklesbian culture, "Viva Tabatha," about a retired French porn star, "Ragga Gyal D'bout" about women who love dancehall music, and "The Gospel Posse" about teenage girls in a Pentecostal church and "Paradise Lost" a personal journey exploring gay life in Trinidad and Tobago.

Film: "B.D. Women "

Kami Chisholm is a doctoral candidate in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and a graduate of Loyola Marymount's Film Production department. Chisholm has taught film, women's studies, and popular culture for over nine years, lecturing at San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, CSU East Bay and UC Santa Cruz. FtF: Female to Femme, Chisholm's first feature documentary (co-directed with Elizabeth Stark), had its world premiere at Frameline30: The San Francisco International LGBT Festival. Chisholm is also the director of "Seven Questions about Desire," an experimental erotic documentary slated to premiere in July at the 2006 Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Recently, her co-directed shorts "A Conversation with Elizabeth's Father" and "Sigmund Freud: Professional Psychoanalyst" premiered in 2004 and 2005 respectively at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Elizabeth Stark, co-drector of of FtF: Female to Femme, is the author of the novel Shy Girl, published (by Farrar, Straus & Giroux) in 1999, in paperback from Seal Press in 2000, and in German from Orlanda Press in 2003. It was a national bestseller on the Lambda Book Report list and at A Different Light, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumely Award. Elizabeth completed her MFA at Columbia University in 1996.She worked as a reader and editor at The Paris Review, has read, performed and taught in New York City, San Francisco, and points between, and is currently finishing her second novel. In 2006-2007, she will be a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz.

Film: "FtF: female to femme"

Trina Espinoza is a 28 year old from the Central Valley whose love for storytelling caused her to gravitate to the medium of film. With the encouragement and support of QWOCMAP's  Madeleine Lim, Trina's foray into filmmaking started with Serve Thy Master. She currently works as a computer graphic artist, but hopes to find more opportunities to produce her own works.

Film: "Serve Thy Master"

A West Indian American dyke, Sandy Falby resides in Oakland, California. She feels that videomaking is the perfect medium for showcasing the richness and beauty of the African diaspora. "Texture" is the first in a series of films about the Black female body.

Film: "The Texture of Honesty"

 

Jessica Lawless is a visual artist, filmmaker, and educator living in Los Angeles. Among other things, Lawless is a former conspirator in the Guerilla Girls inspired arts collectives "SisterSerpents" and "Lilith's Revenge" and a founding member of the Seattle based self-defense and arts organization, "Home Alive." Lawless has completed five years of graduate school (including a MA in Cultural Studies and a MFA in Studio Art) and will begin teaching at Pitzer college in the Media Studies department this fall.
Film: "in(formation) sequence"

Melissa Levin began as a textile printer and in 1997 she started making video works while at the Chicago Art Institute Grad Program in Textiles.  Now she works in whatever medium is right for her projects.   Her eight short videos, including "Lisa Lisa", "Baking with Butch 1 and 2", and "Cherries in the Snow: an ode for Joan Nestle" have won awards and been shown in over 200 International Film and Video festivals. Her first feature documentary "Class Queers" (co-directed with Roxana Spicer) aired on Canadian Broadcasting Corporations' Rough Cuts in 2003. She immigrated to Canada from San Francisco because they allow same sex immigration! 

Film: "Cherries in the Snow: An ode to Joan Nestle"

Madeleine Lim is an award-winning independent filmmaker with over 18 years of experience and she has served as a consultant on over 70 film projects. Her films have been featured at sold-out theaters at international film festivals around the world, museums, universities and broadcast on PBS. Founder and Executive Director of Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), the Singapore-born filmmaker is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco where she teaches Advanced Video Production.

Film: "Dragon Desire"
Photo by: Mirissa Neff

Rebeka Rodriguez is a queer Chicana photographer, filmmaker, educator and computer geek living and working in San Francisco. She is a founding member of the feminist roller skating collective QualityBad. She is a Program Director at Intersection for the Arts, and currently serves on the Advisory Boards for Proyecto Lucha, and Project Spera. Rodriguez holds a B.A in Art History from U.C. Berkeley. She likes to collaborate, scheme and dream up projects with fellow artists and activists.

Film: "Quality Bad Funds the Revolution"

Crystal H. Weston has vast experience in journalism and is a published writer in a variety of mediums. Ms. Weston attended New York's High School of Art & Design and published her first article at the age of 16 in the New York Amsterdam News , the oldest Black newspaper in New York City. In 1994, she graduated from Northeastern University School of Law and served as the 1994-95 Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Fellow at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. A dynamic motivational speaker, Ms. Weston has presented at several national conferences and local events, including the 2005 Queering Femininity Conference. Consistent with her life-long interest in the arts, she is a graduate of the Queer Woman of Color Media Arts Program, where she produced, directed, and edited her first video, Feminine Sense .

Film: "Feminine Sense"

Margo Rivera-Weiss. Butch. Born in Miami. Tropically-influenced cultural creator. Happily married.

Film - "¿Tienes Hambre?"

 

 

Panelists

Tina Cristina Maria D'Elia, is queer mixed-race Mexican, Italian, and German power femme: Actor/ Playwright/Screenwriter/ and Performance-Poet.  Tina has performed for the queer latin@ artist group QueLACo and she is best  known for her one-woman show: Groucho: A Day in the D'Elia Soup , performed in festivals such as: Women on the Way and the National Queer Arts Festival. She's performed for three years in Fresh Meat her latest piece; "The Lost Black Jack King in Our Eyes" was performed at ODC Theater, adapted from her short-storey published in Lambda award winning Best Lesbian Erotica 2004.  Her film Groucho adapted with screenwriter/director, Michael La Rocco, screened locally and internationally .  Currently Ms. D'Elia is currently adapted her one-woman-show and the screenplay Groucho: A Queer Loca into a 6 character play with director, Mary Guzman and musical director Claudia Montagner

 

Cindy Emch has worked in queer media professionally since 1998. She was a member of the programming team at Frameline for over five years and continues to contribute to the Festival in a freelance capacity. Currently she is a Film Programmer for AtomFilms.com and AddictingClips.com She is also a published poet, spoken word performer, curator and host of the Queer Open Mic in San Francisco, freelance pop culture / film writer, film consultant, and a publicist / curator for a variety of queer arts projects. She has been a park ranger, panelist, "celebrity" judge, radio DJ, editor in chief, receptionist, accountant, retail slave, corset model, telephone
operator, official salad manager, popcorn guru, and so much more. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, their dog, and two cats. She currently identifies as a tomboy femme.

 

Shawna Virago is a trans-fox rock star, actress, leftist political activist and filmmaker. She and her band, The Deadly Nightshade Family, were called ”lo-fi headbangers” by the Bay Area Reporters and have performed at clubs and events including the San Francisco Dyke March, East Bay Pride, and the San Francisco Pride Main Performing Stage. Ms. Virago is the first transsexual woman elected to the Board of Directors of San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR). She is a founding member of TransAction, a group of transgender people who organize to expose state violence against the transgender and genderqueer communities. She has served on the Transgender Human Rights Task Force, sponsored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Ms. Virago has starred in several underground movies and her own films have screened throughout the world. She has also performed in the radical performance series Fresh Meat!