Film and Digital Art Portfolio

Lacuna

Lacuna mines the filmmaker's personal diaries to explore the nuances of different but interconnected forms of abuse, how emotional abuse is enabled, and the havoc it wreaks on a life.

Leakage

Winner of the Cinema Award
Doctober Collegiate Film Festival

This short, non-fiction experimental explores three genres of sexual violence narration: Open Letters, personal journals, and official complaints. Each genre in its own act is complicated or troubled. This short film is specifically produced with rape victim-survivors in mind as a primary audience, and as such, works actively and intentionally to build trust while delving into difficult and varied conversations about sexual violence.

Collective

Dir. Geneveive Newman
Composer: Lia Knight
This film foregrounds the process and experience of trauma from one survivor, folded in with the unique aesthetic experiences of multiple other survivors of rape and intimate partner violence in order to create a collective vision of the experience. By representing this collective experience, I hope to work towards a collective response to sexual and gendered violence.

Dead Water

Dir. Geneveive Newman
DP. Zack Wall
This experimental short eschews narrative in favor of impending dread in the face of decayed femininity.

Anxiety

Dir. Geneveive Newman

Shot primarily in extreme close-up and utilizing intentionally unsteady camerawork, this piece strips away character and narrative to put all focus on tone and mood.

Falling

In one single shot, played in reverse, this film features edited audio clips from public domain radio broadcasts at the onset of the Korean War, interspersed with "Dimension X," highlighting the eerie confluence of fantasy and reality during the Cold War era.

Asymmetric Control Series

This project began as an attempt to alter memory. As we all do, I stumbled onto photos I'd rather not see. In my case, they were of my abuser and rapist. I've spent close-on a decade healing since these photos were taken. The pieces below are an amalgamation of memories, personal journals (an archive of my feelings), and political commitments that have developed in the years since my trauma initiated. These were not produced to raise awareness. No one is unaware of the havoc rape and abuse wreak. It is to find other victims and survivors and lend them some solidarity.

This is a political act. We Keep Us Safe.

(In) Perpetuity

People are not fixed, static beings. The notion that we are perpetually in flux, on its face, is oxymoronic in its deployment of constancy (the never-ending lack of change to the state of change) and fluidity (while the fact of change remains static, that also means the person in question cannot). This series of self portraits explores the literal and figurative ways in which my life has been structured around, by, and through ruptures, cuts, tears in the fabric of personhood, being, body, and mind. Rupture does not always mean that something has been violently rended, nor does it mean that a clean, amicable break has occurred. It simply means a fundamental change has come about to change the face of the person, place, object, structure, or thing at hand.

CW: Abstract depictions of self harm

Small Collections

The top selection, Dissertation Ruminations, includes "Whose Rape? Not Hers." and "Pull Threads. Bleed." The project visually traces the stumbling blocks inherent to producing a large piece of scholarly writing, particularly on a topic close to the soul like sexual violence and abuse in the world and in media. Pieces will be added as I work through the final stages of my dissertation drafting and editing, representing a visual narrative of how writing something that feels so important, and so impossible, happens.

The bottom selection, Trauma Maps, includes "I. Still. Remember" and "No." Trauma Mapping was a concept I came to via memoir writing practice but have since deployed as a visual tactic to retracing and recognizing where trauma is located geographically. This allows for a micro and macro understanding of the spatiality of trauma that I hope will resonate with other victim-survivors.