Elisabeth Subrin: An Interview

Elisabeth Subrin is an artist and filmmaker who engages a wide range of genres, forms, and contexts to create conceptually driven projects in video, film, photography and installation. Her work seeks intersections between history and subjectivity, investigating the nature and poetics of psychological "disorder," the legacy of feminism, and the impact of recent social and political history on contemporary life and consciousness.

In this interview, Subrin reflects on the way she approaches art, describing her process of transforming invisible or marginalized women’s histories into multi-layered visual narratives. Throughout, Subrin emphasizes her desire to create new forms of cinematic language while resisting the commercial pressures and structural sexism of the film industry. She also explores her personal and artistic trajectory and discusses her early exposure to feminist ideas, alternative media, and art cinema, and how those influences, along with her own experiences with depression and political activism, shaped her approach to filmmaking. She recounts her formative years at the Art Institute of Chicago and MassArt, where she gravitated toward a hybrid practice that wove together film, video, performance, and feminist theory, often clashing with institutional boundaries and aesthetic conventions.