Zoe Beloff — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Zoe Beloff works across a wide range of media, including film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media, installation and drawing. Seeking to graphically manifest the mind's unconscious processes in her work, she uses both archaic apparatuses and new analog/digital hybrids. Beloff has written that she considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. With each project she aims to connect the present with the past, to create new visual languages where, she writes, "modern media will once again be invested with the uncanny."

Beloff, who has directed many independent films, has also created numerous interactive digital media projects. Her interest in early cinema has led her to explore links between 19th-century industrial mechanics and 20th- and 21st-century computer technologies, in the transition from the "real" world to virtual space. Writes Beloff: "Interactive cinema is itself an emerging media. Its language is in the process of being invented. This is my ongoing project."

Beloff has collaborated with artists from other disciplines, including composer John Cale, the Wooster Group Theater Company, and composer, singer and performance artist Shelley Hirsch.

Beloff was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and moved to New York in 1980. She received an MA from Edinburgh University and an MFA in film studies from Columbia University, and was in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2003), The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997), NYFA (1997, 2001), The Graham foundation, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and Change City College to Queens College CUNY. She has received individual artist grants from foundations including NYSCA, Jerome Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and has had residencies at Harvestworks, Hallwalls in Buffalo and Tesla in Berlin. She teaches digital media at City College in New York.

Her work has been shown internationally at venues that include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Freud Dream Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Biennial de l'image, Paris; Galerie Vox, Montreal; San Francisco Cinematheque, 2009 Athens Biennale; and MuHKA Museum. Antwerp, among others. Her exhibition The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle was exhibited at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn from October 2009 to November 2010.

Beloff lives in New York.