Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1954. She studied at the University of Chicago (1971-72) and at Oberlin College (1972-1975), where she graduated in Art and History of Art. In 1976, after a six-month trip through North and West Africa, she moved to New York to work as a photographer. The following year, she attended a Super 8 film course at the Millennium Film Workshop, an alternative space within the experimental film world, where she discovered her true vocation. From Super 8 for her first short films, she transitioned to 16mm, and since 2004, she has been making films in digital video. 

With a strong feminist and humanist conscience, a great deal of honesty, sensitivity, and a sharp sense of humor, Su Friedrich has made over twenty films from the late 1970s to the present. These films stem from her personal experiences, emotions, dreams, fears, and desires, exploring forms of self-knowledge and understanding of the world through intimate processes (such as love, sexuality, and illness), familial aspects (like her relationship with her father and her mother’s life story), and social issues (including gentrification and lesbian activism). Each film represents an additional piece in a sort of essayistic self-portrait, embodying the motto "the personal is political." 

She writes, films, edits, and designs the sound of each of her works with great formal freedom, marked by the juxtaposition of texts, sounds, and images from diverse origins. Her films resonate with a broad audience, even those unfamiliar with experimental, feminist, or queer cinema, and have been presented at major international film festivals and museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Stadtkino in Vienna. They have also been screened at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver and the National Film Theatre in London. In 2024, the Punto de Vista festival in Pamplona curated her first retrospective in Spain, which traveled to the Filmotecas of Barcelona, Valencia, and Galicia, as well as the Cineteca in Madrid. Su Friedrich's work is part of significant public collections, such as those at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Belgian Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia. Additionally, the original materials of her films are preserved in the Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. 

In parallel with her work as an independent filmmaker, Su Friedrich worked for many years laying out books and magazines using analog tools. Later, she began teaching at various film schools, including The New School, NYU, and Princeton University. She has also embarked on projects like creating a website about the African American filmmaker William Greaves and Edited By, an online database compiling information on female film editors. 

Actualitzat: 20-03-2025