Lizzie Borden Masterclass

Lizzie Borden Masterclass

Lizzie Borden has won critical acclaim for her pioneering feminist narratives and her commitment to amplifying the voices of marginalised women. Her films — particularly Regrouping, Born in Flames and Working Girls — have been widely lauded for their bold engagement with race, class, gender and sex work through a feminist lens. English poet and critic So Mayer described Borden’s downtown New York films as a New York feminisms trilogy: “The three films together amount to a rich compendium of cinematic approaches and feminist thought. Borden highlights the necessity for an imaginative, evolving, and intersectional approach to political struggles.”

Lizzie Borden (Detroit, 1958) is a key director and screenwriter in the landscape of independent feminist filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. After settling in New York in 1972, she threw herself into the downtown artistic and political movement and began working in film as a self-taught creator. She directed three essential films — Regrouping (1976), Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986) — and later contributed to several TV episodes in the 1990s. Her brief yet decisive filmography secured her a prominent place in the history of alternative cinema, and her films have been screened at institutions such as the MoMA, the Harvard Film Archive, the Anthology Film Archives and, in Spain, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, Tabakalera, La Casa Encendida and MACBA.

This activity ties in with the Parallel Section Lizzie Borden.