Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often rooted in rigorous archival research, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on feminism and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001); feature-length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013); the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011); and her documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, MFA Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. At the Ulrich, she’ll be speaking about her approaches to cinematic storytelling through a feminist lens and will share her research and ideas about a trove of little-known fashion photographs by Marian Stephenson in the Ulrich collection. Click here to learn more about Salon Circle.
