Bio
Mary J. Daniel is a long-standing member of Vancouver's media arts community, now based in Toronto. Originally schooled as a filmmaker at Simon Fraser University, she has a fifteen-year history of making hard-to-categorize works focusing on the artistry and poetry of mundane phenomena. These include several deceptively accessible experimental films and videos, and a feature-length study of everyday storytelling, Connecting Lines, invited to the 1991 Toronto Festival of Festivals. She is the writer of several broadcast documentaries, including an educational series on the history and practice of alternative filmmaking in Western Canada, and the producer of an award-winning omnibus of six films by six women on the six senses. She has lighting or shooting credits on over two dozen independent productions, run countless technical workshops, and held academic teaching positions at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
Her work has shown at cinematheques, art houses, universities, micro cinemas and a variety of festivals, including International film festivals, the Creteil Women's Film Festival, and the gay & lesbian festivals of London, Hamburg, and Milan. Her awards include a Jury Prize (Coming to Her Senses, 1996) and a Special Mention (This Missing You, 1996) from the Yorkton Short Film Festival, and the Steamwhistle Award for excellence in a Toronto artist (Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist, 2004) from the 2005 Toronto Images Festival. Daniel completed her MFA at York University in 2006. Pieces of her recent anthology of short poetic films and videos, Pictures of Things That Aren't There, were featured in curated programs at the Kassel Documentary Festival and the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. The work as a whole is slated for exhibition at Toronto's Pleasure Dome in the fall of 2007.