Media artist Kathleen Sweeney will give a lecture, "Representations of Teenage Girls in American Cinema," and screen her work, Maiden USA, on Monday, Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the Kirner-Johnson Auditorium (room 144) at Hamilton College. This event is free and open to the public.
Kathleen Sweeney's Maiden USA is a multi-media presentation series exploring images of, by and about American teenage girls. Her accompanying lecture focuses on the evolution of the teenage girl icon in popular culture from the 1960s to the present.
Sweeney is an award-winning media artist and writer whose video art has screened extensively at film festivals, museums, galleries, and media art spaces across the United States and Europe. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Film Arts Foundation, and Media Alliance.
In addition, Sweeney curates a traveling showcase of films and videos by teenage girls, and she serves as consultant, lecturer and artist-in-residence for national youth media, arts and advocacy organizations such as Girls Inc and Reel Grrls. In 2001, Reel Grrls, a collaboration of 911 Media Arts and the YMCA of Greater Seattle, began teaching media literacy skills to teenage girls and leading video production workshops for them. Through her work with Reel Grrls and other groups, Sweeney focuses on helping teenage girls learn to make movies that talk back to the way girls are usually represented in the media.
The lecture is sponsored by the department of English, the Kirkland Endowment, and the Kirkland Project at Hamilton College. For more information on this event, please contact the Kirkland Project at 859-4288.
