Joan Braderman


Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.

Early life and education

Joan Braderman was born in Washington, DC, to parents Betty and Eugene Braderman.
Braderman attended Harvard University, graduating in 1970 with a BA cum laude where she recalls being the only woman in her filmmaking class. In 1971, she entered graduate school at New York University. Braderman's studies began with a focus on 16mm filmmaking. Once in New York City, she studied Cinema Studies, the new graduate department at NYU, but her focus moved on to video art production. She was taught by friends, comerades, and by herself at the free Media Access Centers which could be found in New York state at this time. Throughout the 1970s, Braderman was an anti-war, feminist and civil rights activist, involved in various political organizations. She received her MA from New York University in 1973, and a Masters of Philosophy in 1976.

Personal life

Braderman was first married to her work partner, Manuel DeLanda in 1980. She was then married to Robert C. Reckman in 1996. Reckman is a design-builder and co-founder of Construct Associates in Northampton, Massachusetts. He hoped to convince her to remain in Northampton, where he was part of building the town's renaissance. She left New York City and accepted a job at Hampshire College in the well-known Film, Video and Photo Program there.

Career

Braderman is a Professor Emerita of Video, Film and Media Studies at Hampshire College. She has taught internationally at institutions such as The School of Visual Arts in New York City, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, The Hartford University Art School, The Media School at The University of the Arts, London, and the Universidad catolica portuguesa in Porto, Portugal.
She is president of the small video/film company No More Nice Girls Productions. She has served on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts as well as other feminist organizations such as the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, NYC. She also served on the boards of film and television organizations including the Association of Independent Film and Videomakers, publisher of The Independent; The Independent Television Service, and others. Braderman worked with several mass organizations for coalition building and shared electoral work for local progressive politicians such as Jose Rivera. In the Coalition for a Peoples Alternative, she had worked with Rivera on organizing the "Peoples' Convention" in 1980 to advocate for affordable housing, and a variety of other issues for which progressives had been fighting. The Convention temporarily reclaimed 12 burnt-out blocks of the South Bronx at Charlotte Street in NYC where they built their own "White House" and Peoples' Park. There, 5,000 delegates from all over the country including Puerto Rico, camped and conducted their plenary sessions in a huge tent on the site.
Braderman is a founding member of , a magazine produced by a collective of feminist artists and writers to publish work by women in the arts. She wrote and directed her film, The Heretics, about the collective in which 24 artists spoke about the times they shared challenging established notions of gender and power. The Heretics was premiered in a solo screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009 where it ran for a week.

Film, video and writing

Braderman's work appears in numerous international permanent collections:

Documentaries

No More Nice Girls Productions

Braderman's non-profit production company is located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The company produces all of Braderman's video/film works, multimedia works, web sites and web series for online, TV, home video and gallery distribution.
The No More Nice Girls mandate expresses an investment in allowing artists to secure freedom of speech through access to the medium of video and internet. They aim to produce and distribute analytical, intelligent film that prioritizes multiple subjectivities and envisions a democratic future.
The company includes a facilities cooperative and a screening space, as well as community outreach programming. Other members include Crescent Diamond, Dana Master and Stashu Kybartes.

Themes

Braderman's work engages with ideas about female identity. A common theme in her work is a critical look at the production of media and popular culture, including the unforgiving representation of women in these spaces. Braderman has stated: "my work has been about creating alternative representations of dominant rhetorical categories such as woman, sexuality, space, or politics."
Braderman's work engages with feminist art histories of collage, combining the medium with irony and black humour. Braderman's work also invests in producing a record of a women's movement that threatens, via a variety of forms of backlash against it, to disappear from history.

Writing

Braderman was a founding member of the Heresies Collective, which published from 1977 to 1992, during the second wave of feminism. During the 1970s she contributed to the feminist journal as a member of the publishing collective as well as with writing and editing of two issues of the magazine.
Braderman has written original scripts for all of her own produced works. as well as several yet unproduced pieces. She also wrote script materials for Manuel DeLanda's experimental works in film such as, "Raw Nerves; A Lacanian Thriller". She has written critically about issues of representation in film and video, popular vs. "high" art, ideas of utopia, critique and redefinition of the so-called "documentary" film as well as women in film, feminism and the Women's movement and popular, avant-garde and non-fiction films and videos. Her essays include Feminism and Video: A View From The Village,"Camera Obscura; Archive for the Future", The First International Festival of Films by Women, Artforum, September 1972. Reclaiming the Utopian Movement, "Paper Tiger Television", and Feminism, the individual and what's left: "" Issue 1, Number 1, 1977."

Reception

Braderman's work has been reviewed widely. Notable reviews have been included in publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, The Independent, The Washington Post, and Art Journal. Her work is currently distributed by: The Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago; Women Make Movies; LUX; and The Danish Broadcasting Corporation. Braderman was previously distributed by Paper Tiger Television until its archives were donated to Deep Dish Television and the NYU Libraries.