Cathy Lee CRANE has been charting a speculative history on film since 1994. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Her body of work enjoyed its first survey in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. Crane’s award-winning films (which include the experimental biographies Pasolini’s Last Words and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil) have screened at Viennale, San Francisco International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Cinematheque Francais, BFI, and Arsenal/Berlin and are distributed by Canyon Cinema, Lightcone, and Films Media Group. Her first feature-length fictional hybrid The Manhattan Front (2018) premiered at SFIndie Fest in 2018 with a profile in Filmmaker Magazine. In 2020 she will release Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the border town of Columbus, New Mexico which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency and the El Paso Cultural Foundation. Her engagement with the history of the US/Mexico border will continue as 2020 Residency Fellow at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, where she will prepare an installation of Drawing the Line, a film series presented at the 2019 Poetics and Politics Documentary Research Symposium at UC Santa Cruz. Crane is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College.

CATHY LEE CRANE is the recipient of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video. She had previously received a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship for Film and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work enjoyed its first national survey at the National Gallery of Art in 2015 as part of their series American Originals Now. Her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front that was produced with the assistance of IC students and premiered at the San Francisco IndeFest in 2018. In 2020, Crane released Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the US/Mexico borderlands. It was supported by the El Paso Community Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. All of her short films have been broadcast on television in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by ZDF/3sat and are distributed on 16mm celluloid by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. She has also directed music videos, created installations, and photographed numerous films for other directors, including I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, the feature-length documentary and installation project she also researched for Harun Farocki. She has lectured on the intersections between queer and experimental cinema and has curated a dozen short film programs in San Francisco, New York, and Europe, including the six-part series Queer Innovators, co-curated with Jim Hubbard for the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her critically acclaimed film Pasolini's Last Words, an experimental full-length biography on the last year of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's life, enjoyed its world premiere in 2012 as a "gem of world cinema" in the Panorama International Section of the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal. It went on to be a part of major Pasolini retrospectives at the British Film Institute in London, the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, and Arsenal in Berlin. The film was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail when it screened at Union Docs in Brooklyn at the conclusion of the MoMA retrospective in 2012.

Cathy Lee Crane has been making narrative/documentary hybrid films on 16mm since 1994. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Her first feature Pasolini's Last Words (2012) was supported through grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film. The film enjoyed its world premiere at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema as a "gem of world cinema" in the Panorama International section. The film was released on DVD by Salzgeber in late 2014. Her award-winning short films have been broadcast on European television and are distributed by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. In addition to her short work in 16mm, she produced the experimental biography Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil (2006) that was funded by an Individual Media Artist Grant from the San Francisco Film Commission in 2001 and is distributed in North America by Films Media Group. She has collaborated as projection designer and cinematographer for Joanna Haigood, Harun Farocki, and Strom/Carlson and was commissioned by Aurora Picture Show in Houston to premiere her own installation work for the gallery in 2015. Crane received the first North American survey of her work at LA Filmforum in March 2011 while an Artist-in-Residence in the Directing Program at California Institute of the Arts. She was also invited to screen her complete works at the National Gallery of Art in 2015 as part of the American Originals Now series. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College.

Cathy Lee Crane has crafted lyrical films on 16mm for nearly twenty years. Combining archival and staged material, her award-winning shorts include the adaptation of a novel by André Breton, an investigation into the German town of Halle through the paintings of Lionel Feininger, and an early sound musical with San Francisco legend Rodney O’Neal Austin as Louise Brooks. She has collaborated on numerous installations as cinematographer or projection designer, including I Thought I was Seeing Convicts by Harun Farocki. Her two long-form biographical films reinvent the form by staging her subjects’ thought as spectral theatre. The films about Simone Weil and Pier Paolo Pasolini are elegiac essays that utilize rear-screen projection as a means by which actors undo the fiction of reenactment. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support the production of a speculative history on how the United States entered World War I as told through the story of one girl’s adoption by a butcher in 1917. She is currently in preproduction on the next in her ongoing engagement with the last works of important writers: a multiple-screen installation that stages Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?