Katie Jefferis
Current Projects
When a drug reaction collides with an intense incident of gaslighting, Fran is thrust into a parallel world of paranoia and delusion, an odyssey that tests her relationships and resilience as she struggles to find the fastest route back to reality. (Feature Film)
Image: Francesca Woodman, Antella, 1977.
‘Black Mountain’ is an hour-long historical miniseries about the experimental arts college that operated between 1933 and 1957 in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina.
Founded under John Dewey’s principles of “learn by doing” and “art as experience,” the school was an ideal of democratic experimentation, a refuge for European intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution, and a summer get-away for artists who went on to form The New York School.
The college was progressive in its tolerant approach to race and sexuality, an incubator for the American avant-garde, and interpersonally a soap opera.
The #FemaleGaze Project is a visual media-based, interactive social movement, across multiple platforms to generate visibility and support for female-identifying filmmakers and to inspire the creation of visual media for, by, and about women.
The concrete goals of the movement are to bring production resources into the hands of women, to generate stories with strong female protagonists, and to create a world where the voices of women are valued equally to men’s.
When we empower women with the tools, skills, and courage to create art, how will it change society and the stories we tell?
Pitch Deck image: Alexandra Rubinstein, Breakfast Hamm, 18" x 18", oil on panel; part of her ‘A Dream Come True (Celebrity Cunnilingus)’ series, 2015– .
“I was a neurotic. Art was my salvation.” –Alice Neel
‘Alice,’ a feature-length bio-pic about expressionist portrait painter Alice Neel, traces five fervent years in the artist’s life, living and painting in Greenwich Village in the 1930s after a series of nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. Opening in the hospital suicide ward as Alice awakens from a drug-induced coma (à la The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), the film explores how ‘madness’ is connected to creativity and the emotional exposure of processing personal wounds through one’s work.
Images are watercolors by Alice Neel (from left to right): “Alienation” (1935); “Untitled (Alice Neel and John Rothschild in the Bathroom)” (1935); “Alice and José” (1936).