Nancy Andrews

Nancy Andrews lives on the coast of Maine, where she makes films, drawings, props and objects. She works in hybrid filmic forms combining storytelling, documentary, puppetry, and research. Her characters and narratives are synthesized from various sources, including history, movies, popular educational materials and autobiography. Her work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Jerusalem Film Festival, Flaherty Seminar, Nova Cinema Bioscoop, Brussels, Belgium, and Taiwan International Animation Festival, among others; and is in the film collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and six of her films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, LEF New England Moving Image Fund, Illinois State Arts Council, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (supported by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts), and National Endowment for the Arts. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1995, and her undergraduate studies were at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, BFA, 1983.

au•gust art festival project

In the video On A Phantom Limb (2009, 35 mins) by Nancy Andrews, birds are conflated with humans in an appealing, sometimes goofy collage style.  Andrews also uses found medical footage and shots of her own surgical scars to hint at her near-fatal illness and surgery, though she abjures the pathos too often evoked by experimental artists as they recount their ailments. Her decision to avoid telling her story in the first person actually makes the piece more affecting, while the fragmented form suggests that any single person’s story is also the story of the larger culture.

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