Amie
Siegel

Amie Siegel was born in Chicago in 1974, and completed a Bachelor of the Arts degree at Bard College in 1996. Since then she has worked as a poet, video artist and filmmaker, and has received numerous promotional awards and fellowships (MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Princess Grace Film Foundation Award, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Edith Ruß Haus für Medienkunst, etc.).

In 1996, during a long stay in South East Asia, she made the experimental video travel-film “Pasang Naik” (“The Tide”), which examines questions of tourist perception. In 1999, Amie Siegel published her first volume of poetry “The Waking Life”. In the same year, she completed her 45-minute film “The Sleepers” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; a variation on the phenomenon of voyeurism.

As a Visiting Artist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, where she now works as a lecturer in film and video, Amie Siegel developed the material for her experimental feature film “Empathy”, a deconstruction of the power dispositive in psychoanalytical and documentary practice; for this project, she worked with 16mm- and digital video material as well as 3-D animations. “Empathy” enjoyed a successful premiere in the Forum of the International Film Festival Berlin in 2003, was shown at other international festivals, and was also shown in US cinemas as of 2004. In her video installation “Berlin Remake” (2005), Amie Siegel staged studio scenes from GDR films as a double film projection, which was then shown in the exhibition “Forum Expanded” at the Berlin Kunstwerke during the Berlinale 2006.

Since her period as a DAAD fellowship-holder in Berlin in 2003, Amie Siegel has remained faithful to the German capital as a theme of her work. At present, she is developing two full-length features entitled “The Captives” and “DDR DDR”, which are both set in Berlin. The centre of Literary Research in Berlin has commissioned Amie Siegel to complete a work on the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin: “Walter Benjamin // Detlev Holz – German People”. The video installation will be premiered in autumn 2006, at an anniversary colloquium in honour of Benjamin.

Amie Siegel’s works are exhibited internationally, incl. in the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, in the Cinemathèque Ontario, in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and many more. She lives and works in New York und Berlin.