BIOGRAPHY

About the Artist

Since 1981, Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous film festival awards, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, Stan Brakhage Vision Award, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She’s a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was the director of the graduate program in film for 30-years.

Artist Statement

I consider myself a storyteller working within the psychological landscape of contemporary fairy tales, dreams and poetry. I explore archetypal themes where my characters are often shaped by violence, basic cold-heartedness and trauma. The last few years, I find myself leaning towards creating works that consider the frailty of an environmentally vulnerable world and our place in it. This world might be in a backyard, a deserted housing project, a snow-covered rock or a rough sea.

A Parable of Now (2024)

My most recent work, A Parable of Now (2024), is a vertical three-channel video installation It is not a straight-forward narrative but a visual poem with many possible meanings and interpretations. In part, it represents my reaction to environmental change and our uncertain futures. At the same time, embodied in the work is also a meditation on the state of innocence and childhood, leaving one with a sense of unsettled hope.

In the past few years, there has been internet exposure for my 1983 musical murder horror story, Possibly in Michigan that I made with singer/songwriter/composer Karen Skladany. The media attention began in 2015, where an excerpt from Possibly in Michigan made the front page of Reddit. Then in the summer of 2019, a15 second clip from one of the songs was posted on TikTok. Now there are over 12 million views and Possibly in Michigan has been traveling around the world via YouTube’s vast algorithm, and its popularity spreading out onto my other works that have many thousands of views.