The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant that will be awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art.

Hammer Grant applications will reopen Fall 2024

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Hammer Grant applications will reopen Fall 2024 〰️

Image by Eric McNatt for the 2017 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project

“It has been the goal of my life to put a lesbian lifestyle on the screen. Why? Because when I started I couldn’t find any! ...I picked up a camera in the 60s, late 60s, made Super 8, 8mm, finally went to school and got a 16mm camera. Made 13 films in two and a half years. All experimental. Because I think that as a lesbian at that time I was living an experimental lifestyle. Well let’s just say, I was experimenting. And I still am. And I think that lesbian film really calls out for experimental work. ...Working as a lesbian filmmaker in the 70s wasn’t easy in the social structure — the educational institution that I was in. It was difficult. And I want this grant to make it easier for lesbians of today. So you can make work that you want to make.”

— Barbara Hammer

ABOUT

The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. Work can be experimental animation, experimental documentary, experimental narrative, cross-genre, or solely experimental. Applicants must be based in the U.S. This grant was established by Hammer in 2017 to give needed support to moving-image art made by lesbians. The grant is supported directly by funds provided by Hammer’s estate and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. The grant includes an award of $7,000.

Applications for the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant were open November 1st through January 24th.

LORENA BARRERA ENCISO WINS SIXTH ANNUAL BARBARA HAMMER LESBIAN EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING GRANT

Lorena Enciso Barrera, courtesy of the artist.

Queer|Art is excited to announce the winner of the 2023 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, Lorena Barrera Enciso. The New York-based filmmaker will receive a $7,000 cash grant, as well as studio visits with members of the judging panel in support of their creative and professional development.

Barrera Enciso was selected among 149 applicants who applied for the Hammer Grant in its sixth year, winning for a project currently titled Manos, an experimental short documentary composed of interviews that document the daily routines of Latin-American immigrant workers in the service industry of New York City.

The piece's soundscape reconstructs the chic dinning room of the big city, a space which relies on the fragmentation of bodies to maintain efficiency. Meanwhile, interviews with co-workers and friends speak to the racial inequality in the service sector that is known but generally not made public. The stories and reflections the artist has been trusted with rely on the anonymity of the individuals and the fragmentation of the body, this time as a form of self-preservation. Manos introduces a series following immigrant communities resisting erasure. She writes, “there is reverence in the act of filming the people who shape the experience of culture and luxury, and there is dignity in voicing our experiences.”

Lorena Barrera Enciso is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist. Her film work observes the inherent choreography of the body in motion and the sense of longing that is inarticulate and exists without spoken language. Through her experiences as a brown migrant body, she explores the fabrication of identity and invisible labor in the context of the United States. The tactile quality of her work yearns for intimacy and favors exposition methods closer to the warmth of community and alternative to the big screen. However, her work, like her, is a body of many homes. She is currently based in Queens, NY.

Upon receiving the award, Barrera Enciso remarks, “I feel so honored to be awarded this grant. Manos is a piece that has been in production since Fall 2021. While in the past, my process has been solitary, I believe the urgency of the subject requires specific skills which I do not have and could not fund on my own. This grant will allow me to bring the project to completion with the care and dignity it deserves.”

2023 BARBARA HAMMER GRANT FINALISTS

2023 HAMMER GRANT JUDGES

*Left: Taylor Renee Aldridge by HRDWRKER; Right: Nazlı Dinçel courtesy of the artist.*

Taylor Renee Aldridge is a curator and writer. She joined the California African American Museum (CAAM) in August 2020. Her first project at CAAM was Enunciated Life, a contemporary art exhibition in which Black spiritual beliefs—as well as the movements, sounds, and other bodily expressions that have engendered communication within and beyond Black churches—operate as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender. Aldridge has organized critically acclaimed exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artists Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and The Luminary (St. Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an influential journal of art criticism for Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Canadian Art, Contemporary And, Detroit Metro Times, Hyperallergic, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She holds an M.L.A. from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and B.A. from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.

Nazlı Dinçel is a non-binary trans filmmaker and a first-generation immigrant born in Ankara, Turkey. They studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Their films have screened at museums, festivals, and micro-cinemas around the world, including the MoMA and MoMI (NY), IFF Rotterdam, MuMok (Vienna), BAFICI (Buenos Aires), Hong Kong IFF, etc. Dinçel’s hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption. They record the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation, and desire with the film object: its texture, color, and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language, and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society. They have previously received The Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium (2018), Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Eileen Maitland Award, a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2018), and was formerly a 2019–2020 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University. They live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

ABOUT BARBARA HAMMER

Barbara Hammer sorting through her archive by Vanessa Haroutunian

Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) began making films in the 1970s. She is most well-known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change, often through an exploration of the materiality of the filmmaking process and its relationship to the body’s potential as subject, form, author, and screen. She has been honored with seven retrospectives, including a forthcoming exhibition later this year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Previous retrospectives took place at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway, and The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.