BIOGRAPHY
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Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist, born in Vancouver, WA, whose work quote “operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research” end quote. She holds an MFA in Film, a PhD in Anthropology, and is a Full Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston, MA. From domestic to global concerns, and from the personal to the political, Ramey’s award-winning, anti-colonial films are characterized by many forms of celluloid manipulation, including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Beyond her own work, she is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.  
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Ramey’s scholarly work is quote “focused on the social history of the Avant-Garde film community, the anthropology of visual communication, and the intersection between avant-garde and ethnographic film and art practices” end quote. She has published articles in Visual Anthropology Review, JumpCut and The Independent as well as the anthologies Women’s Experimental Cinema (Duke), Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (U of Chicago), Anthropology and Art Practice (Berg), and Experimental film and Anthropology (Berg).

Ramey has many awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, the Social Science Research Council on the Arts fellowship, the LEF New England moving Image Grant, a Yaddo residency, Marble House Residency, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. Her films and installations have screened at many, many film festivals and other venues including the Toronto International Film Festival, the TriBeCa film festival, MadCat Women’s Film Festival, 25fps Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. 
Her book Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (Routledge, 2016) is quote “a thinly veiled experimental ethnography on the contemporary experimental film scene, masquerading as a textbook on experimental film techniques, written in the freehand voice of a zine.”

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2026
KATHRYN RAMEY
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PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, March 18th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

WEST: What I know about Her (2012)
“A gem of a piece, historical and personal in both its craft and its content, a film in which one can almost feel the breath of the ancients.” –John Gianvito
 
WEST: What I know about her is an experimental documentary about Elizabeth Crandall Perry: adventurer, midwife and distant ancestor to the filmmaker. Ramey and her then 5-yr old son, explore the path Perry took across the American West and film side-by-side through monuments to American expansionism until they arrive at the family farm in Oregon. Juxtaposing found footage, historical narrative and contemporary looks at the Willamette Valley, the film is a meditation on how to understand a past fraught with contradictory points of view and the role of the artist in the making of meaning.
 
ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE (2017)
An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 “Emak Bakia” made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. Whereas Man Ray alluded to death with a rending of collars (a funereal tradition in many cultures including Ray’s, Judaism), ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE chooses from a surplus of tragedies the recent Amnesty International Report “Will I be Next?” on US drone strikes in Pakistan and a list of the 101 children killed by them as of April 2015. Juxtaposed with footage of the filmmaker’s young sons (standing in for Ray’s muse and mistress Kiki of Montparnasse) the film obliquely points to the privilege inherent in the banal peacefulness of my family’s everyday life.
 
LIMEN (2019)
threshold. between two states of being. the boundary of perception.
 
Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION (2009)
Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION is an experimental documentary about a, now obscure, American expansionist and military dictator, William Walker who, through military force and coercion, became president of Nicaragua in 1856. The film blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing and hand conducted time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to history making that have been applied to this story. Yanqui WALKER as a contemporary work of film art, not only tells us something about history and how it connects to current political, social and economic situations but also how art and poetry can be a means to subvert and transcend even the most oppressive of narratives.


PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, March 19th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) (2023)
EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) is a feature-length anthropological journey through the United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico. Mixing over a hundred years of found footage – tourism, agricultural and propaganda films – with contemporary portraits of local artists and activists and Puerto Rican punk rock/noise music, the film reveals how carefully crafted American fictions of “democracy” and “debt” obscure a capitalist and military domination that is ongoing. Moving between old and new; Spanish and English; between paradise and environmental destruction the EL SIGNO VACÍO becomes a “re-educational” film challenging the viewer to re-think about modern colonization, its mechanism and responsibilities.