CV

Krissy Mahan
dykeumentary@gmail.com
www.dykeumentary.com

Biography
Krissy Mahan is a working class daughter, filmmaker, artist, professional Mx Fix-It, and certified Aging-In-Place Specialist (2011-) trained in designing adaptable housing in compliance with current ADA standards. Determined to create a world that is more fun for everyone, Mahan learned to make movies in the early 1990s and hasn’t stopped amusing herself since. Over the past twenty years Mahan has developed a body of work exposing the absurdity of man-made barriers to human movement, happiness, and social access.

Film Festivals (short videos):

New York Feminist Film Week, New York City, 2018, 2017
Leeds Queer Film Festival, Leeds, UK 2017
Glasgow Short Film Festival (in Oska Bright program), Glasgow Scotland, UK 2017
Wotever World Film Festival, London, UK, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016
Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Glasgow, UK 2017, 2016, 2015
Women Over 50 Film Festival, Brighton, UK 2017, 2016
GAZE International LGBT Film Festival in Dublin, Ireland Summer 2016
British Film Institute/SQIFF “Queer Women In Love” Festival 2015
Gender Reel (different locations every year) 2017, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011
GenderReel at New York University, NYC, February 2015
Gender Odyssey, Seattle, 2007
Austin Gay/Lesbian International Film Festival, Austin, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004
Ed Wood Summer Quickie Film Fest, Albany, NY, 2004

Non-festival video screenings:
LesbianLives2017 Film Program at Lesbian Lives, Brighton, UK 2017
Older Women Rock! Film Program at the Folkestone Quarterhouse, Kent, UK 2017
LFest, Curated by Theresa Heath, Staffordshire UK, Summer 2016
“Queers In The City” Curated by Scottish Queer International Film Festival, May, 2016
“Wotever World DIY Films” screened at the British Film Institute, London, August 2015
STREET, Curated by The New School (Parsons School of Art & Design), screened at UnionDocs Brooklyn NY, May 2015
Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, New York, NY, 2014
Wotever World DIY Film Fest Fundraiser, London, UK 2014

Video work in support of artistic collaborative projects:
“A Love Note To The People Of Pennsylvania” with Nijmie Dzrinko 2016
“I Dream” for Sharon Bridgforth’s “River See,” 2014
“I Am” with YaliniDream and Jendog Lonewolf, for Sharon Bridgforth’s “River See,” 2014
“Killing Time” with Jobina Tinnimans, 2013
“Kadalum Aliyum” with YaliniDream, in progress 2009 – present
“Quiet Come Dawn” with YaliniDream and Kiebpoli Calneks, 2009
“love conjure/blues” with Sharon Bridgforth, 2006, 2007
This work was reviewed by Dr. Alison Reed in Text and Performance Quarterly In the article “Traumatic Utopias: Holding Hope in Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues”
“Pink: A Love (courier) Service” with Jaclyn Pryor, 2007
“Half-Breed/Southern Fried/Check One” with Florinda Bryant, 2006
“Floodlines” with Jaclyn Pryor, 2006

Video work in support of community activist projects:
“PA Insurance Commissioner Betrays Residents of PA” 2017
“Informe SIDA – How It Started” 2016
“Victory! Put People First Wins Insurance Premium Hearings” 2016
“Not One More Deportation,” Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, New York. Made a video connecting chattel slavery and immigration enforcement.
“Starlite Stays!” Starlite Lounge, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY, 2010. Raised awareness of the impending eviction of Brooklyn’s oldest and only Black-owned gay bar.
“A Luta Continua,” Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2011. Created video to explain what was happening. Documented actions in support of (unsuccessfully) maintaining the independence of this historic academic institution.
“It Gets Better, Rural Dykes” A video made about my experiences living in upstate New York, for Dan Savage’s YouTube and book project.

Past and Current Collaborations
Member of Bring Mumia Home, providing media support for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal. 2018 – present

Member of Put People First PA, Justice For Fayette Working Group, providing media support for grassroots organizing against toxic conditions in Pennsylvania prisons 2016 – 2018

Member of The Austin Project (a group of women of color and allies who build relationships based on trust, creativity and commitment to social justice by writing and performing work in the jazz aesthetic), 2005-2013

 

Academic Press:

Traumatic Utopias: Holding Hope in Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues,” Alison Reed. Text and Performance Quarterly Volume 35(2-3)  July 2015

Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies, ed. Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, Brian J. Gilley. NYU Press, 2015 (pp 174-177)

On Children’s Literature and the (Im)Possibility of It Gets Better, ed. Merritt Mason. ESC: English Studies in Canada, Volume 38, Issue 3-4, September/December 2012. (pp. 91-95)

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, an Creating A Life Worth Living, ed. Dan Savage and Terry Miller. Dutton, 2011, pp. 71-73).

 

Published Essays

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project, ed. Omi Osun Joni L Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010, pp.106-109).

That Takes Ovaries: Bold Females And Their Brazen Acts, ed. Rivka Solomon (Three Rivers Press, 2002, pp.152-153).

Visual Art Solo Shows (cut paper):
The Glass Gallery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC,1999

Visual Art Group Shows (cut paper and photography):
Circus Orgasmuz, London, UK 2013
Gender Reel, Philadelphia, 2012
La Pena’s “Toma Me Corazon XIV” Austin, 2006
Arts For Peace, New Paltz, NY 2003
Mid-City Art Gallery, Kingston, NY 2001
Greene County Council on the Arts, Catskill, NY 2001
Hudson Arts Walk, Hudson, NY, 2000
Columbia-Greene Community College, Hudson, NY,1999, 2000

Editorial Illustration (cut paper):
Postwar Communities, Identity and Belief: A Symposium at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, February 2002

Book Cover Artwork: (cut paper):
The Emotional Politics of Racism by Dr. Paula Ioanide, Stanford University Press, 2015. Cover
The Challenge to Change:
Reforming Health Care on the Front Line in the United States and the United Kingdom
by Dr. Rebecca Kolins Givan, Cornell University Press, 2016. Cover

Writer’s Cover Headshot: (photography)
Ana-Maurine Lara for Erzulies’s Skirt, Redbone Press, 2006.

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