Creative Capital

Elisabeth Subrin

Elisabeth Subrin’s films and videos examine the intersections of history and subjectivity within female biography. Engaging conventions of documentary and personal narrative, the works strategically undermine their own forms, shifting historical periods, genres and characters to explore the residual impact of the 1960’s, and the hazy boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Subrin has presented her films extensively in the United States and abroad, including at the New York Film Festival, The Whitney Biennial, American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, and The Guggenheim Museum, among many other institutions. Her work has been covered extensively in The New York Times, Artforum, New Literary Histories, Los Angeles Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Chicago Reader, Frieze, BOMB, The Village Voice, Afterimage, and Film Comment. Subrin was born in Boston in 1965 and received a BFA in filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. In 1995 she received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and lives in Brooklyn.