Janie Geiser
Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power, and loss. Geiser is a Guggenheim Fellow, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, and a Creative Capital awardee. Geiser received the 2023 Stan Brakhage Vision Award, presented to a filmmaker “whose work pushes the limits in avant-garde and experimental filmmaking.” She was recently awarded 2025-26 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island.
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Heliotrope
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2023 • 7 minutes
A subterranean unraveling, seeds fall to the ground with nowhere to land. The only witness is blindfolded, and she, too, falls at some point. The underground factory operates day and night, the burrowing continues, in a long slow attempt ...
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Reverse Shadow
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2019 • 8 minutes
Rivers run red, planes hover above the waters, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.
Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from a c...
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Flowers of the Sky
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2016 • 9 minutes
Flowers of the Sky (a medieval term for comets) draws on two panoramic photographs, found in a Los Angeles thrift shop, that depict a gathering of members of the Eastern Star, a Masonic order. From the Double Vision series.
“In Flowers o...
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The Floor of the World
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2010 • 9 minutes
In a shifting landscape of dirt and sky, excavation and construction merge. Figures move back and forth between life and death, and possibly somewhere else. The ephemerality of existence is a mundane question in this world, where numbers ...
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Kriminalistik
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2013 • 5 minutes
From the found book pages of an early twentieth-century German book on forensics, Geiser uncovers hidden narratives. Evidence is scientifically arranged and catalogued, suggesting a corridor to knowledge. Elusive. Crimson. From the Double...
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Ghost Algebra
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2009 • 7 minutes
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a ba...
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The Fourth Watch
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2000 • 9 minutes
The Fourth Watch was one of Film Comment’s Top Ten Avant-Garde Films of the Decade (2000-2010)
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last watch before morning was called the fourth watch. In the hours before dawn, ...
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The Red Book
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 1994 • 11 minutes
An elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three-dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language, and identity from the point of view of an amnesiac.
The...
