Desire & Dystopia: The Personal Cinema of Lisa Crafts
Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel
September 12, 2025, 7:30PM (Doors)
Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: https://www.millenniumfilm.org/event-details/personal-cinema-lisa-crafts
Millennium Film Workshop is proud to present Desire & Dystopia: The Personal Cinema of Lisa Crafts, a rare evening devoted to the films and animated works of visionary artist Lisa Crafts. Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, the program surveys nearly five decades of groundbreaking work that spans erotic cel animation, ecological poetics, and multidisciplinary experiments in moving image.
From her infamous 1979 debut Desire Pie, a bold erotic cartoon seized by Cambridge police the very day it opened, now housed in the Museum of Modern Art, to her most recent animated installations exploring environmental precarity, Crafts has continually redefined the very language of animation. Her practice refuses boundaries: cel and cut-out animation, live performance collaborations, installations, and hybrid works that blur still life, landscape, and dream worlds. The result is a cinema that is as sensual as it is dystopian, where humor coexists with chaos, beauty with collapse, and desire is a profound expression of liberation.
Saint-Michel writes: Lisa Crafts’ work is fiercely personal yet insistently collective. She reveals not only the erotic and the catastrophic, but the fragile threads of resilience in between. These films feel simultaneously like missives from a lover and dispatches from another dimension where imagination is a survival tactic and intimacy is a common tongue.
Crafts’ career includes animated contributions to Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and independent documentaries, yet it is her independent work, darkly poetic, richly rendered, and quietly subversive, that has established her as a singular figure in the history of experimental animation. A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and professor emerita at Pratt Institute, her films and installations have screened worldwide, from Europe and Asia to galleries and festivals across North America.
Event Details
Date: Friday, September 12, 2025
Time: 7:30 PM (Doors)
Location: Millennium Film Workshop
167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237
About Lisa Crafts
Lisa Crafts is an animator and moving image artist whose multidisciplinary work is characterized by richly rendered images, a dark poetics, and quiet wry humor. Themes explored include environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity and chaos.
The work has changed form to fit each project. Her earliest work, Desire Pie, is an unabashedly explicit erotic cel (cartoon) animation. The day it opened, the theater was closed down by the Cambridge, MA. police. Desire Pie now resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Glass Gardens is a black and white cut-out animation film about the role creativity plays in the survival of the human spirit. After drawing the artwork, Crafts built her animation stand to be able to film it, a bit like building one’s own car. The Octopus’s Exultation was a one-hour live music/animation performance in collaboration with composer Caleb Sampson.
For the past 15 years, her work has focused on questions surrounding the environmental crisis. Blending animation, video, photos, drawing and sculpture, her work inhabits the blur between what is seen and what is imagined. The work is structured in the form of animated still lifes, landscapes and portraits. Her current work, Drive-In Movie for Leaf Litter is an animated installation that pulls us into the fecund and mysterious world of the forest floor and the precarity of this ecological and political moment.
Crafts’ work has screened in festivals, theaters, galleries and museums in Europe, Asia, and throughout North America. In addition to her independent work, she created animated segments for Sesame Street and The Electric Company; and has animated dreams, memories and hallucinations for many independent documentaries.
Over the years, Crafts has had a side practice of practice of drawing and painting. Her current drawings are Stainboys, pareidolic portraits of perceived creatures that seep up to the sidewalk.
She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and MacDowell.
About Michèle Saint-Michel
Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, poet, and curator whose work explores power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and the poetics of care. Her films and interdisciplinary projects have screened and exhibited internationally at venues including Hypha Studios, Cubitt Artists, APT Gallery, Prismatic Ground Festival, Derapage, Lumifest, Fisura International Festival, and Maysles Documentary Center. She is the founder of Bad Saturn Media and curator at Millennium Film Workshop, where she develops large-scale exhibitions and multi-author publications. Her recent projects include Grief is an Origami Swan: An Artbook on Grief and Quantum Intimacies, an exhibition on embodiment and resistance. Saint-Michel holds an MA in Artists’ Film & Moving Image (distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is based in New York City.
About Millennium Film Workshop
Founded in 1966 by filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of New York’s experimental film community for nearly six decades. Through low-cost equipment rentals, workshops, screenings, and its influential Millennium Film Journal, Millennium has supported generations of independent filmmakers. From early programs with artists like Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich, and Todd Haynes to ongoing exhibitions in its new Brooklyn home, Millennium remains dedicated to expanding access to the tools and ideas of non-commercial cinema.