Melissa Friedling
Director of Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Filmmaking
Email
friedlim@newschool.edu
Office Location
D - 79 Fifth Avenue
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Profile
Friedling is a media artist, writer, and educator interested in the jumbled layers of media histories. Much of her work begins with found or ‘happened upon’ media that prompts an excavation of the marginalized and sometimes metaphysical narratives contained within them. Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally at venues including the Barbican Center (London, UK) Tribeca Film Festival (NY), PS1 MoMA (NY), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo), Art Space (New Haven), Microscope Gallery (NY); New Orleans International Film Festival, Ann Arbor (MI), Atlanta Film Fest. Select honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts, a Fulbright Award, and residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and International Studio and Curatorial Program. In 2006, she also founded the web video production company, Slouch Productions. In addition, her writing on film, art, and culture has been published widely including essays in Flash Art International, Afterimage, and Discourse and a book, Recovering Women: Rhetoric, Feminisms, and Addiction (Westview Press, 2000). She has been teaching courses in film and video production and media studies at the New School since 2004. Overall, she teaches with an eye towards a reflective media artist who is not just trained to perform a series of technical skills, but who can also see the big picture, use techniques and tools critically and purposefully, and is appreciative of a wide range of film traditions and modes.
Degrees Held
Ph.D. Rhetorical Studies. University of Iowa.
Recent Publications
Friedling, M. and Lin, L. (2024), "Pareidolic Cinemas," Portable Gray, 7(1), pp. 81 - 97.
Friedling, M. (2023), “The feral film habit of OJOBOCA,” Journal of Environmental Media, Special Issue: ‘Cinezoonosis’, 4(1), pp. 187–212.
Friedling, M. (2022), "Gestational Filmmaking with ART: An Odd Pair," Portable Gray, 5(2), pp. 278 - 291.
Performances and Appearances
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Official selection, Prismaic Ground Festival, 2024.
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Official selection, Mimesis Documentary Festival, 2023.
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Official selection, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2022.
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Video Design + Projection for theater production, All My Fathers at LaMaMa Experimental Theater (NY,NY), 2019.
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Video Design + Projection for theater production, Faust 3 at Judson Memorial Church (NY, NY) 2017.
Research Interests
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Re-purposed and residual media
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Experimental film practices
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Digital filmmaking
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Media archeology
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Media and the environment
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Experimental animation
Awards And Honors
MacDowell Residency Fellowship and Elodie Osborn Fellowship Award. 2023
NYSCA Individual Artist award. 2022
The Flaherty Preservation initiative in conjunction with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) preservation fund. “Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot” (2010) selected for archival preservation. 2022.
Lightpress Grant. Interbay Cinema Society. 2022
Finishing fund grant from NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre. 2020.
Yaddo Residency Fellowship. 2020.