Janis Crystal Lipzin Receives Guggenheim Fellowship!

Posted April 14th, 2022 in Announcements, News / Events


Congratulations to Bay Area filmmaker, educator, and longtime Canyon artist member Janis Crystal Lipzin, who last week was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship!

Hailed as “one of the key American media artists of this era,” Lipzin has been making art in virtually every form of reproducible media for nearly 50 years. Utilizing such diverse media as 8mm and 16mm film, various kinds and formats of photographic prints and transparencies, video, audio, digital photography, multi-media installations, and media performance, she has confronted an array of uncomfortable subjects such as pyromania, prehistoric murder, pesticide abuse, reproductive rights, and mortality. Another central foundation of her practice is a diverse approach to materials. In her hands, light-sensitive film becomes a medium to be worked, marked, chemically altered, affected by light both within and exterior to a camera.

In addition, Lipzin has been a hugely influential teacher. As Grahame Weinbren notes, “Lipzin has had an unmatched impact on the art of film through her activities on behalf of the experimental film community and her influence on several generations of students since the 1970s.” From 1978 to 2009 Lipzin taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and served as Chair of SFAI’s renowned Film Department. Before that, Lipzin directed the Film/Photo Program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.


Canyon Cinema currently distributes film prints or DVDs of 20 of Lipzin’s films. 10 new digital files, including the recent films Ontogeny (2021-2022) and Some Mistakes I Have Made (2021), along with Shut Out the Sun (2015), Flapping Things (1974), Periodic Vibrations in an Elastic Medium (1976), Right Eye/Left Eye (1984), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1976), Visible Inventory Nine: Pattern of Events (1981), and Visible Inventory Six: Motel Dissolve (1978) (the subject of a chapter in Jordis Lau’s new book: Appropriations of Literary Modernism in Media Art: Cultural Memory and the Dynamics of Estrangement), will soon be available as well. 

For more information about Lipzin’s work, visit: www.jclvision.com