ABOUT
Since her first film class Ariel has always, in turn, taught others -- youth, teachers, women prisoners, and everyday women -- to encourage them to tell their own stories on film. She brings that same wide perspective to audiences, encouraging them to seek a broad range of media that educates, informs and entertains them about events in their own lives and in the world around them.
Ariel Dougherty
Filmmaker & Teacher
Ariel is a teacher / mentor / innovator / seer / leader of youth, women's, and community media. An emphatic advocate of women-identified media, she was on the cutting edge of feminist filmmaking's historic emergence in the late 1960s.
Decades later she remains committed to community based, self-determined and independent media as paramount in transformation to a just society. She has written reports, analysis and dozens of articles on the intersections of feminism, media and funding. In urban and rural settings alike she has taught in after school programs and prisons; in special teacher workshops and museum programs gaining an unheralded experience and perspective. She has curated many series of film programs, including Women's Work in Film and Video at the Women's Studio Workshop, in Rosendale, NY. A co-founder of Women Make Movies in 1969, she was a teacher in its community based workshop and originated its distribution service at the incorporation of the organization in 1972. Ariel has directed / produced & mentored hundreds of films / tv shows such as CULTURAL DEMOCRACY ECOLOGY (1988-92); FROM THE INTERIOR, COLONIZED (1992 with Vandana Shiva); and WOMEN ART REVOLUTION (2010) Lynn Hershman’s documentary on the feminist art movement. At present she is researching contemporary US girls and young women's film teaching programs for a book, re-investigating parellel projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s and crafting theory and policy based on these combined experiences.
CONTACT
Have a look, too, at Curate, Screen, Lecture
Ariel can liven up any screening
