Kiki Loveday (s/he, they) is an award-winning emerging scholar, mixed-media artist, and filmmaker obsessed with deconstructing (and reconstructing) cinematic convention: rewriting film history, rethinking genre and gender, mixing mediums, and practicing alternative production paradigms. S/he works across multiple forms including scholarly essays, short narrative films, experimental videos, gallery-based installations with participatory elements, and live and site-specific performances (sometimes produced in collaboration with choreographer Sasha Welsh).  Across mediums, her irreverent and challenging work is process-based and deeply rooted in archival research, oral and vernacular histories, experimentation and collaboration.

Her early creative work exploring themes of gender and sexuality, cultural memory, ambition and isolation has been supported by artist residencies with the Feminist Center for Creative Work at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles, and The Swarthmore Project at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore Pennsylvania (in collaboration with choreographer Sasha Welsh). Her creative work has been presented in gallery-based group shows, showcases, festivals, and microcinemas from The Coney Island Film Festival in Brooklyn, New York to the Virginia Scott Galleries of American Art at The Huntington in Los Angeles. Excerpts of her early work are archived on ArtFem.TV. 

Loveday’s research on early cinema, feminist media histories, and contemporary artists has been published in peer reviewed journals, anthologies, and online, including Feminist Media Histories, Framework, the Women Film Pioneers Project, The Cue Art Foundation’s On-verge, Basement Cinema’s 2016 Yearbook, and her blog Loose Lips. Essays are forthcoming in Early Popular Visual Culture, Framework, and in an edited anthology. Her research and writing have been generously supported by fellowships from The Feminist Media Histories Initiative at University of California Santa Cruz, Women in Screen History at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and through the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program (IAAC). Her scholarly work has been presented nationally and internationally from The Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH) to Women and the Silent Screen at the Eye Institute (Amsterdam).

Loveday’s research and teaching focus on femxle authorship, feminist, queer and intersectional historiographies and methodologies, the development of individual voice, and the creative process across theory and practice. As an exceedingly shy child with a speech impediment, Loveday was put in acting classes as a corrective measure. The out-of-the-self experience of theatre games and camaraderie of community theatre instilled in her an early love of pushing beyond her comfort zones, which shapes her approach to teaching and making.  S/he studied Meisner Technique for a year-and-a-half at an audition-based conservatory-style high school for the arts under Christopher Cull. When Cull asked her to stage manage, s/he took the opportunity to study his process of directing, which remains a formative training experience in direction.  Her early training also includes internships with the award-winning Pig Iron Theatre Company (Philadelphia, PA), The Fearless Theatre Company: for young people with and without disabilities (NYC), and Baronholtz Productions as a script reader (NYC). S/he holds a BFA in film and television production from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; an MA in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University; an MFA in cinematic arts from University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; and a PhD from University of California Santa Cruz with a dissertation on the queer and feminist significance of Sappho in early cinema (1896-1931).

Contact: kikiloveday (at) gmail.com