Author

S. Topiary is an interdisciplinary media artist, filmmaker and writer, currently pursuing a hybrid theory/practice PhD in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.  Her work crosses genres, integrating documentary, found footage animation and essay with performance and original sound design to create poetic meditations on ways that myth, archetype and allegory inform contemporary experience. Her current research is focused on landscape film, environmental documentary, urban environmentalism and collective environmental social practice art and activism. Her work has been presented in film festivals, theaters, art galleries and museums through the US and internationally and has received grants and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Experimental Television Center, Radar’s Writer’s Lab, and Mount Tremper Arts.  In 1997, Topiary was a member of the first Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show US tour.  She received an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College (2002) and has taught at the School for Visual Arts, CUNY College of Staten Island, Pratt Institute, the Graduate Media Studies program at New School University in New York City and at UC Santa Cruz.