Join us on Thursday, December 5 for a screening and discussion with pioneering video artist Susan Mogul, moderated by scholar and filmmaker Alexandra Juhasz. The screening will include selections of Mogul’s foundational early videos – essential parts of the feminist video canon – and more recent innovative work.

The screening will include:

Dressing Up (1973) (Excerpt)

Take Off (1974) (Excerpt)

Mogul Is Mobil Redux (1975/2022)

Comedy as a Back Up (1976) (Excerpt)

Sing O Barren Woman (2001) (Excerpt)

Tell Me About Your Mother (2024) (Excerpt)

Having been involved with video since the early 1970s, Susan Mogul is a pioneer of the medium. Initially producing an important and influential series of humorous and staunchly feminist performance videos, her practice quickly expanded to more complicated and experimental forms of narrative and documentary. Throughout her career, Mogul’s work has remained fiercely political and incisive while being accessible, entertaining, and often utterly hilarious.

Mogul moved to California in 1973 to study with Judy Chicago in the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. While there, she was introduced to video. Her early video pieces were sharply hilarious feminist critiques, taking cues as much from standup comedy as they did from performance art or documentary film. Mogul quickly became a central figure in the community of feminist artists in Los Angeles.

Mogul’s video work would take many forms over the subsequent years, often finding new and surprising ways of approaching autobiography, mixing memoir and personal musings with a wide range of styles, genres, and mediums – including installation art, performances, and photography. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Trust, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the ITVS Commission. Her work has been exhibited and screened around the world, including the Getty Museum, the Pompidou, the Kunsthaus Graz, and the Austrian Film Museum. Her 2008 documentary Driving Men played to great acclaim at film festivals around the world. In 2022, a major, career-spanning survey of Mogul’s work, “Susan Mogul: What Becomes a Legend Most?,” was mounted at Warsaw’s Zacheta National Gallery of Art

Alexandra Juhasz is a scholar and media artist. She is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (2005), Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking, co-edited with Yvonne Welbon (2018), We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, with Thedore Kerr (Duke University Press, 2022), and My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy (2022). She has directed the feature documentaries Women of Vision: 18 Histories of Feminist Film and Video (1998), Dear Gabe (2003), Video Remains (2005), and SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), and the short videos RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001). She is the producer of the featuring films The Watermelon Woman (1997) and The Owls (2010), both directed by Cheryl Dunye. Juhasz’s current work engages with COVID and AIDS, fake news, online feminist pedagogy, and other radical uses of digital media.

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Tags: Alexandra Juhasz, Chucagi, Media Burn Archive, Online, Susan Mogul, Virtual Talks with Video Activists: Susan Mogul with Alexandra Juhasz