Urban Estuary

Dana Plays is an award winning, American film director known for her documentary, narrative and avant-garde works that interweave personal themes. Plays utilizes a experimental approach to her work, weaving a rich landscape of imagery, that combines metaphor with iconography creating poetic resonance.

Dana Plays, born in Baltimore, Maryland, is a filmmaker 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.

Dana Plays is an award winning experimental filmmaker, digital artist and professor of Film and Media Arts at The University of Tampa. Her work has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition The Color of Ritual, The Color of Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America 1930-2000, programmed by Whitney curator by Chrissie Isles, as well as other notable venues including the Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque and more than 50 international film festivals where her films have garnered 25 film festival awards. Plays' work consists of a variety of approaches to experimental documentary and the visual film, utilizing optically printed found footage and/or footage that she has shot.

"Plays' work falls within the rich terrain mapped out by the feminist avant-garde as it has emerged in the last 15 years; it represents a rich and astute reworking of feminist film theory as it collides with personal lives. This feminist project attempts to reclaim memory, snapshots, recreated images, sounds, voices, and discarded footage as historical traces. The exceptionally evocative cinematography and optical reprinting laced throughout all her films suggests that Plays' project is to use manipulated images - whether through optical printing, composition, or light - to uncover their psychic imaginaries. Very, very few feminist filmmakers have the courage to unleash the ambiguities in voice and image; most want to anchor both. As a result, all of Plays' work asks spectators to let go as they watch, and work within the interstices between sound and image."

-Patricia Zimmermann, Professor, of Screen Studies, Ithaca College, Codirector of
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

As a critic who writes about experimental films, I am familiar with Dana's extensive body of film work. I have been impressed by the eclectic range of themes and techniques she has explored and developed throughout her career. In subject matter, her films range from ethnographic studies to formal explorations of the cinematic image. She is an adept documentarian, as well as master of the art of optical printing. Although her films are varied, there is a personal vision and a sense of integrity and purposefulness that unites them into a coherent whole. Dana approaches political issues such as the people of El Salvador and the United States government with sensitivity. Never heavy-handed or didactic, her films manifest her political convictions in a lyrical, personal way. Her films also have a consistent sensual richness; their lush imagery is organized into dynamic compositions that unfold with graceful rhythmic patterns of repetitions and variations." - Christine Tamblyn, Film Critic and Scholar (1951-1998)