Maïa Cybelle's photostream  

Maïa Cybelle Carpenter is a moving-image artist and curator from NY and France. She has called San Francisco home for the past ten years and currently works as the Executive Assistant to the Managing Directors of Elevation Partners in Menlo Park, CA.

Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally including, Ars Electronica, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Ontario Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art Gallery NY, Directors Guild of America, The British Film Institute, The Berlinale, The Taiwan Cinematheque, and PBS Television. Her films are included in several private collections in North America and her work is distributed by Canyon Cinema (USA), Collectif Jeune Cinema (France) and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (Canada).

She has served as a visiting curator for the Pleasure Dome in Toronto, was the Programming Coordinator for MIX NYC at Anthology Film Archives, a curator for SF Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a programmer for the SF International Film Festival. She was involved for a number of years with Phil Hoffman’s Independent Imaging Retreat in Mt. Forest, Ontario and has completed an artist residency at Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (2005).

Maïa has taught hand-processing and alternative film technique workshops and given guest-artist lectures at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Academy of Arts in San Francisco, at Mills College, San Francisco State University, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto and at Phil Hoffman’s Independent Image-Making Retreat in Ontario, Canada.

She has a BA (1997) in Women’s Studies/Film Theory from Barnard College, Columbia University and has a MFA (2001) in Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2006 joined the Board of Canyon Cinema (canyoncinema.com/) and is currently the President of the Board. She has been on the Advisory Board of LunaFest (www.lunafest.org/) since 2005, whose proceeds go towards the Breast Cancer Fund.

Artist Statement:
I position my work against the narrative expectations of moving-image media. Through explorations of the material specificity of film and video, I seek to produce new dialogues with philosophical and current cultural approaches to visual form. Taking identity politics beyond overt polemics, my work engages its audience in multi-layered examinations of identity through spatial experiences.

As an artist, the practice of curating allows me to build a body of research around theoretical problems that I consider in my own work and to mobilize a community of other artists who also wrestle with these questions.