BIO
Katrina del Mar is a New York-based artist, photographer, writer and award-winning film director.
Her solo exhibition Girls Girls Girls was presented in January 2013 at Participant Inc. in New York City. Her solo exhibition, Gangs of New York was presented in 2010 at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto, Portugal. Invited to teach at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, she conducted the first ever “Queer Trash Feminist Film Workshop,” also in 2010. In 2012, she presented a series of films and photographs from the Golden Age of Performance Art (1988-2000 with Dona Ann McAdams, On the Edge of Society: Moments in Live Art, at Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark. Katrina has shown her critically acclaimed “Girl Gang Trilogy” of films internationally, including venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France, the Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; Nightingale Cinema, co-presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival, the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach, and Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, Iceland. Katrina’s work has garnered numerous awards including a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, “Best Experimental Film” from the Planet Out Short Movie Awards announced at the Sundance Film Festival, the 2010 Accolade Award of Merit, and Winner of Juried Competition, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, 2012.
PRESS
“There’s a lot going on in Katrina Del Mar’s head. Take the time she was driving from a funeral in Louisville and passed a sign for a town called Tracy City. “I’ve never been there, but in my mind it’s a sad little place full of girls named Tracy, who are a combo of Ramona the Pest and a Riot Grrrl, full of adolescent longing and anger, ready to beat you up,” Del Mar says. “I thought it would be a great name for a band.” Now Del Mar fronts a combo named “Tracy City,” and it’s just the latest step in her artistic development.” – Bob Krasner,”The Villager / AM New York “
“erotic, empowered and electric—think the best parts of feminism and queer theory mixed with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” -Phillip Miner, Huffington Post
“Katrina Del Mar has been active in underground film, photography and erotic fiction for two decades, and her vision is as transcendent as it is transgressive” -Carlo McCormick Photograph Magazine
“Katrina del Mar is perhaps best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; or within her girl gang movie world of strictly female population. Creating a family tree indebted equally to B-movies and diaristic photography, del Mar’s defiantly queer photographs and videos are iconic alternatives to the cultural status quo, offering an exuberant, hyper-stylized sexuality, an unapologetic feminist voice, and often guerilla-style production tactics. -Participant Inc.
“Del Mar means of the sea, but Katrina del Mar is all concrete. Particularly, the sidewalks, endless walls and abrasive faces of New York City. Looking at her photos is like walking down its cool, tough avenues. Already this sounds like an echo of every article written on del Mar. But it’s hard to come up with new words, because she’s so cool, so tough.”- Lisa Carver Nerve, the New Nude (Chronicle Books)
“Any effort to map Katrina Del Mar’s cross-genre oeuvre within the contemporary art or film worlds would run the risk of missing its epic nature… Like Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal, Del Mar’s world is both epic and dystopian—a fictional reality that seems very much like our own, only with different rules. Like Darger, Del Mar marshals armies against each other in eternal conflict, and it’s not always clear who wins or why. What ultimately matters for both Darger and Del Mar is that a gang of girls is eternally on the run—in coordinated outfits—to fight for what they believe in. It’s the promise and the erotic violence of the fight that count, not the outcome, because another fight is always around the corner…Del Mar has captured New York’s last gasp of authenticity, transforming it for eternity…” – JP Borum
“Her obsession with Americana iconography — pinups, burlesque, superheroes and leather-jacketed toughs — strikes an immediate dichotomy with her feeling most at home among queer outcasts caked in the urban grime of New York. Typically armed with an 8mm camera, her extreme close-ups and jarringly visceral cutting cast a beautiful, flickering spell. She and her friends — skaters, musicians, and punks — become larger than life figures with an unforgettable allure.” – Mark Lukenbill, Spectacle Theater
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Katrina del Mar is a New York-based artist, photographer, writer and award-winning film director.
Her solo exhibition Girls Girls Girls was presented in January 2013 at Participant Inc. in New York City. Her solo exhibition, Gangs of New York was presented in 2010 at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto, Portugal. Invited to teach at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, she conducted the first ever “Queer Trash Feminist Film Workshop,” also in 2010. In 2012, she presented a series of films and photographs from the Golden Age of Performance Art (1988-2000 with Dona Ann McAdams, On the Edge of Society: Moments in Live Art, at Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark. Katrina has shown her critically acclaimed “Girl Gang Trilogy” of films internationally, including venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France, the Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; Nightingale Cinema, co-presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival, the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach, and Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, Iceland. Katrina’s work has garnered numerous awards including a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, “Best Experimental Film” from the Planet Out Short Movie Awards announced at the Sundance Film Festival, the 2010 Accolade Award of Merit, and Winner of Juried Competition, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, 2012.
PRESS
“There’s a lot going on in Katrina Del Mar’s head. Take the time she was driving from a funeral in Louisville and passed a sign for a town called Tracy City. “I’ve never been there, but in my mind it’s a sad little place full of girls named Tracy, who are a combo of Ramona the Pest and a Riot Grrrl, full of adolescent longing and anger, ready to beat you up,” Del Mar says. “I thought it would be a great name for a band.” Now Del Mar fronts a combo named “Tracy City,” and it’s just the latest step in her artistic development.” – Bob Krasner,”The Villager / AM New York “
“erotic, empowered and electric—think the best parts of feminism and queer theory mixed with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” -Phillip Miner, Huffington Post
“Katrina Del Mar has been active in underground film, photography and erotic fiction for two decades, and her vision is as transcendent as it is transgressive” -Carlo McCormick Photograph Magazine
“Katrina del Mar is perhaps best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; or within her girl gang movie world of strictly female population. Creating a family tree indebted equally to B-movies and diaristic photography, del Mar’s defiantly queer photographs and videos are iconic alternatives to the cultural status quo, offering an exuberant, hyper-stylized sexuality, an unapologetic feminist voice, and often guerilla-style production tactics. -Participant Inc.
“Del Mar means of the sea, but Katrina del Mar is all concrete. Particularly, the sidewalks, endless walls and abrasive faces of New York City. Looking at her photos is like walking down its cool, tough avenues. Already this sounds like an echo of every article written on del Mar. But it’s hard to come up with new words, because she’s so cool, so tough.”- Lisa Carver Nerve, the New Nude (Chronicle Books)
“Any effort to map Katrina Del Mar’s cross-genre oeuvre within the contemporary art or film worlds would run the risk of missing its epic nature… Like Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal, Del Mar’s world is both epic and dystopian—a fictional reality that seems very much like our own, only with different rules. Like Darger, Del Mar marshals armies against each other in eternal conflict, and it’s not always clear who wins or why. What ultimately matters for both Darger and Del Mar is that a gang of girls is eternally on the run—in coordinated outfits—to fight for what they believe in. It’s the promise and the erotic violence of the fight that count, not the outcome, because another fight is always around the corner…Del Mar has captured New York’s last gasp of authenticity, transforming it for eternity…” – JP Borum
“Her obsession with Americana iconography — pinups, burlesque, superheroes and leather-jacketed toughs — strikes an immediate dichotomy with her feeling most at home among queer outcasts caked in the urban grime of New York. Typically armed with an 8mm camera, her extreme close-ups and jarringly visceral cutting cast a beautiful, flickering spell. She and her friends — skaters, musicians, and punks — become larger than life figures with an unforgettable allure.” – Mark Lukenbill, Spectacle Theater
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