BIOGRAPHIES
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Bydie O'Connor
Brydie O’Connor is a Kansas-born, NY based filmmaker. Her work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.

​Brydie’s work has been presented at Sundance, Berlinale, BFI, Le Centre Pompidou, and The Museum of Modern Art, among other festivals and museums worldwide. Her debut feature documentary, BARBARA FOREVER, won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the 2026 Berlinale and was awarded the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Brydie was selected as the recipient of the Creative Capital State of the Art Prize for New York (2026), received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 64th Ann Arbor Film Festival, a Special Mention for the John Schlesinger Award for a First-Time Filmmaker by the Provincetown Film Society, and was named an honoree for The Maysles Documentary Center's 2026 Albie Awards.

Barbara Hammer
With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. Working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, women’s health and aging, and global political struggles. Guided by her urgent need to document communities rarely represented in mainstream cinema, she asserted that “radical content deserves radical form.” Using documentary and found footage, her works are characterized by her robust experimentation with montage, superimposition, and overexposure.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2025
BRYDIE O'CONNOR // BARBARA HAMMER
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PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, January 20th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Barbara Forever (2025, 102 minutes)
BARBARA FOREVER is an expansive, immersive exploration of the life, work, and ongoing cultural impact of lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer – a pioneering artist who lived boldly, created urgently, and transformed cinema through her singular vision. Her films were an extension of herself: sensual, experimental, and unapologetically lesbian, rooted in a profound desire for connection and an insistence on telling her own story. Driven by her canon of over eighty films, a vast collection of unreleased archival materials, and extensive audio interviews, Brydie O’Connor’s portrait allows for Hammer’s voice and images to shine through, becoming both a tribute and an extension of her legacy.

Barbara Hammer’s films break taboos around female sexuality, aging, illness, and queer love, often using her own body as a site of exploration and political power. Through the course of the film, she shows us that the personal is not only political, the personal is historical. Looking to Barbara Hammer as one of the first filmmakers to put a full lesbian life on screen that wasn’t there before, her work becomes a blueprint for a new generation of queer and radical artists to write their own histories into existence. This exploration of both Barbara Hammer’s life, work, archive, and her ongoing legacy provides an urgent, necessary story of queer life, feminist history, and American cinema. 


PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, January 21st - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

BARBARA HAMMER: PERFORMING LESBIAN
Curated by Brydie O'Connor

Superdyke (1975)
"Superdyke is a gem from early liberation days. Influenced by feminism and lesbian militancy, Hammer’s films are politically pointed, bearing witness to lesbian empowerment and visibility, and formally sophisticated, fully cognizant of experimental film history. Superdyke gives the superhero a witty dyke inflection. It runs from mellow nature-loving to savvy urban pop, showing the thematic range of its author and the multiplicity of lesbian experience." —Juan Antonio Suarez

Double Strength (1978)
"A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze." —Barbara Hammer
"The poetry of Barbara's images carries us through the duration of a relationship: its intensely erotic beginnings, its sense of serenity, its playfulness and comedy and its closure -- the alienation, pain, anger and loss of contact. The death of the body, a theme tenderly interwoven into the ageless strength and agility of Terry Sendgraff's body, becomes the death of a relationship, a closing out, a leaving of the body behind. The body becomes a source of life. Its movement, grace, pain and happiness are contrasted with the inertness of things and the stillness of photos that merely document the brief passage of light." —Jacquelyn Zita, Jump Cut
Sappho (1978)
Made with six students at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

“X” (1973)
Would You Like To Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape (1985)
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York City Subway Tape finds Barbara Hammer (wearing a mask made of subway maps) conducting gonzo interviews with subway riders, getting their thoughts on the city, their fellow passengers, and navigating public space.