Maïa Cybelle Carpenter
Originally from New York and France, Maïa Cybelle has called San Francisco home since 2001. She is the Founder and Chairwoman emeritus of Canyon Cinema Foundation. Mostly recently she led the global Administrative Operations team at Asana and the global Executive Operations team at Square. Additionally, she regularly consults businesses on operations, administration, employee engagement and is a certified leadership coach (PCC, CPCC) for her consultancy, founded in 2017, Carpenter Consulting Partners, Inc.
Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally including, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Ars Electronica Linz, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives at the Berkeley Art Museum, Ontario Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art Gallery NY, Directors Guild of America, The British Film Institute, The Berlinale, The Taiwan Cinematheque, Toronto International Film Festival and PBS Television. Her films are included in several private collections in North America and her work is distributed by Canyon Cinema (USA), Collectif Jeune Cinema (France) and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (Canada).
She has served as a visiting curator for the Pleasure Dome in Toronto, was the Programming Coordinator for MIX NYC at Anthology Film Archives, a curator for SF Cinematheque at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a programmer for the SF International Film Festival. She was involved for a number of years with Phil Hoffman’s Independent Imaging Retreat in Mt. Forest, Ontario and has completed an artist residency at Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (2005).
Maïa Cybelle has taught hand-processing and alternative film technique workshops and given guest lectures at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Academy of Arts, at Mills College, San Francisco State University, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto and at Phil Hoffman’s Independent Image-Making Retreat in Ontario, Canada.
She has a BA in Women’s Studies/Film Theory from Barnard College, Columbia University and has a MFA in Film/New Media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a CPCC from the Coaches Training Institute.
Artist Statement:
I position my work against the narrative expectations of moving-image media. Through explorations of the material specificity of film and video, I seek to produce new dialogues with philosophical and current cultural approaches to visual form. Taking identity politics beyond overt polemics, my work engages its audience in multi-layered examinations of identity through spatial experiences.
As an artist, the practice of curating allows me to build a body of research around theoretical problems that I consider in my own work and to mobilize a community of other artists who also wrestle with these questions.