Dana Plays

Dana Plays, born in Baltimore, Maryland, is a filmmaker and digital artist most known for her award winning documentary and experimental films that have shown widely throughout the world. She picked up her first camera at the age of 9 on a holiday vacation in the West Indies. She began serious study of photography at 15 years of age, when she learned to shoot with a 35mm SLR camera, developed negatives and printed her own work. She subsequently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she was awarded two fine arts degrees from the California College of the Arts (Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts), and launched her career as a filmmaker and digital artist. Enmeshed in the fine art scene of the San Francisco Bay Area, Plays produced a series of experimental films, that she shot and edited herself, a proponent of hands on approach to foster ones own vision. Plays' filmography consists of 31 works in film and digital video, consisting of documentaries, experimental films and installations. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art: Color of Ritual, Color of Women, Avant-Garde Women Filmmakers of the Twentieth Century and more than 50 international film festivals, including Edinburgh, Montreal Nouveau, and Seattle International Film Festivals. Her films have garnered more than 25 film festival awards including the prestigious First Prize Jurors' Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival for Nuclear Family; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Experimental Film at the Houston International Festival for Across the Border; and Best Documentary Award at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, which also was broadcast on VPRO, a Dutch national television network. Since 2005, Plays has had national awards and exhibitions including a Black Maria Film Festival award; a solo retrospective in Boulder, CO, at First Person Cinema, the longest standing American showcase for independent film; a digital installation of her piece Salvage Paradigm, at the Play Space Gallery, in San Francisco; a digital installations of and her video montage of Hollywood films situated in the Los Angeles River, River Madness, at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. Plays serves on the board of directors of Canyon Cinema, in San Francisco. Plays, professor of Film and Media Arts, and Women's Studies, at The University of Tampa has taught all aspects of film and digital production and studies since 1990, with previous teaching appointments at Syracuse University and Occidental College. At The University of Tampa, Plays teaches experimental, documentary and narrative filmmaking, world cinema, independent film and video, and women's studies.