Betzy Bromberg

"ON BEING AND FILMMAKING

All of Bromberg's films are from that same "extremely personal place." They stand out because they are about merging experience with the very act of filmmaking, and about staging the process of knowing who you are in the very work that you create. In "Ciao Bella," one of the final shots is of a jubilant topless dancer caught in a reddish flare and sprocket holes; the picture merges the woman's vivacious energy with film as a medium, and this is a perfect emblem for Bromberg's work. She somehow lets her filmmaking and ideas become embodied in the film itself; they are folded together in a remarkable synergy that could almost be construed as some sort of philosophical system for being in the world."
- Holly Willis, IFilm

Betzy Bromberg is currently the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts. She has been making experimental films since 1976. She recently had a retrospective of her films at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. Her most recent film, a Darkness Swallowed screened at Sundance, Seoul (South Korea), Athens (Greece), Bradford (England) and Seattle Film Festivals. Her films have shown extensively in the United States and abroad, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinemateque, the Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium), the Centre Georges Pompidou (France) and The Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (Spain). Her films have shown at the Rotterdam, London, Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, Sundance, Portland and Vancouver Film Festivals.

Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts, Ms. Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.