Kathryn Ramey
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.
Ramey’s scholarly interest is focused on the social history of the Avant-Garde film community, the anthropology of visual communication and the intersection between avant-garde and ethnographic film and art practices. She has published articles in Visual Anthropology Review, JumpCut and The Independent as well as the anthologies Women’s Experimental Cinema (Duke), Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (U of Chicago), Anthropology and Art Practice (Berg), and Experimental film and Anthropology (Berg).
Ramey has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Social Science Research Council on the Arts fellowship, the LEF New England moving Image Grant, Yaddo Artist Colony, the Marble House Residency and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and has screened her films and installations at multiple film festivals and other venues including the Toronto Film Festival, the TriBeCa film festival, MadCat Women’s Film Festival, 25fps Experimental Film Festival, J’hlava, Antimatter, Ann Arbor, Alchemy and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
Her book Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (Focal Press 2016) is a thinly veiled experimental ethnography on the contemporary experimental film scene masquerading as a textbook on experimental film techniques written in the freehand voice of a zine.