Experimental filmmaking, photography, video, audio, multi-media installations, media performance
Janis Crystal Lipzin (born 1945), is an American artist and educator, working with film, photography, video, audio, multi-media installations, and media performance. Lipzin is known for her work in many media and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over three decades. Lipzin's films offer a unique blend of rigorous conceptual structure, formal investigation, and sensual discovery. The Bladderwort Document is a haunting visual fantasia of her life on a farm in the 1970s; Trepanations is a droll meditation on social forces and women's appearance; and Seasonal Forces, Part One creates a fluid and immediate record of the cultural and seasonal changes in the rural landscape where she lives.[1]She has been an active filmmaker since 1974,[2] when she became attracted to using Super-8 cameras, in part because of their easy portability and flexibility to make changes to a film up to the moment of projection.[3] Her more recent work incorporates both digital and analog film methods.[4][5] wherein light and photo-chemistry collide and conspire to reveal aspects of our world deserving of more careful scrutiny. Her work blends an enduring interest in the volatility of nature and human events with a sympathy for alternative, hand-made methods that she interweaves with digital processes.[6] Lipzin is based in Sonoma County, California.[7]
She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 2009 where she served as Chair of the Film Department and before that directed the Film/Photography Program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.[11]
Among her awards are fellowships, commissions and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,[13] National Endowment for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, Ohio Arts Council, California Arts Council, Mission Eye and Ear, and Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles.[11]