Cecilia Dougherty

Cecilia Dougherty is an artist who works in video, photography, and web applications. She has been making and showing work for the past forty years and her films, videos, installations and photography have been screened and exhibited in hundreds of venues worldwide, including numerous one-person shows and retrospectives. She is a writer and anti-theorist as well. Her book, The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change, is about the interconnectivity of evolutions in the creation of an emergent point of no return – of animals, plants, humans, activities, economies, ideas, technologies, and planetary events.  The Irreducible I was published by Atropos Press in 2013.

She is also the creator of two recent works of Interactive Fiction, Time Before Memory, and Shanidar, Safe Return. Her focus in these interactive stories is a view of human history that is inclusive of earlier and archaic iterations of what is meant by human. These works are set in the Paleolithic era, stretching the idea of what has an effect on the present moment into an understanding of and connection to the deep past.

She is the creator of over 30 works in digital film, video art, and installation over her long career. Much of the content uses the outsider experience of daily life, specifically regarding lesbian sexuality and subjectivity as it reflects, absorbs, and is rejected by the status quo as the basis for a visually-expressed thesis.

She is currently working on a third interactive story, Sí o No,  which is a rough and unforgiving meditation on the politics of migration: the history of human migration, the relationship of enforced migration/deportation to nationalism, fascism’s emergence in America, and the phenomenon of diversity – ethnic, genetic, cultural. Sí o No is her first interactive story in Spanish.

University of California Berkely: Art Practice (Painting) BA
San Francisco Art Institute: Performance and Video MFA
European Graduate School: PhD, Media Philosophy