Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work addresses questions of postcoloniality, racialization, sexuality, identity, and historical memory. Integrating essayistic documentary practices with the projected image installation, Dizon arrives at a form in dialogue with the legacies of political art and cinemas.
She reworks the question of experimental cinema by employing multiple screens, fracturing and fragmenting their time and placement and holding open their montage in order to invite a space to address experiences of loss and displacement, especially as related to processes of migration and citizenship. Her most recent projects have examined the politics of language and visibility in events of civil unrest, the question of witnessing and the mode of presence and temporality that it implies, and the specters left in the wake of state policies related to migration.
Dizon has received numerous awards including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, a Chancellor’s Opportunity Predoctoral Fellowship, a Graduate Opportunity Fellowship, and the Eisner Prize in Film and Video. She has exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Pacific Film Archive, Artist’s Television Access, Southern Exposure, Film Arts Foundation, the Cinema Project, the Women in the Director’s Chair Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Asian American International Film Festival, the Visual Communications Film Festival, the San Diego Asian Film Festival, CineManila, Documental, and universities throughout the United States.
Dizon holds a BA in English and History of Art from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she is completing a Ph.D. in the Department of Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a visiting professor in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts.