Cecelia Condit

Cecelia Ann Condit^[2] (born December 15, 1947) is an American video artist. Condit's films are noted for their attempts to subvert traditional mythologies of female representation and psychologies of sexuality and violence.

Cecelia Condit
Condit in June 2017
Born	(1947-12-15) December 15, 1947 (age 77) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Video Artist and Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee[1]
Years active	1981–present
Known for	Short film, surrealist film
Notable work	Possibly in Michigan Beneath the Skin Not a Jealous Bone

Condit has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Wisconsin Arts Council and National Media Award from the Retirement Research Foundation. Her work has been shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. In 2008, Condit had her first solo show exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation in New York.^[3]

Early life and education

Condit was born in Philadelphia on December 15, 1947. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. She received a BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and a MFA in photography from Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

Career

Condit served as professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.^[4] Her work received renewed attention in 2015 after her short film Possibly in Michigan was posted to Reddit.^[5] Four years later, an audio clip from the same film became a viral hit on TikTok, with over 22,000 iterations created as of July 2019.^[6]

Works

Beneath The Skin

Main article: Beneath the Skin (film)

Beneath the Skin is her first work. A short film, it follows a woman's thoughts and musings towards a recent incident in which she discovered that her boyfriend was hiding the body of his ex-girlfriend in his closet.

It is based on a real-life incident that occurred in Condit's life when she dated Ira Einhorn, also known as the Unicorn Killer. Ira had murdered his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and hidden her corpse in his closet.^[7] Condit, who began dating Einhorn, never found Maddux's corpse due to being on medication that hindered her sense of smell.^[8]

Videography

Year[9]	Title
1981	Beneath the Skin[10]
1983	Possibly in Michigan
1987	Not a Jealous Bone
1996	Suburbs of Eden
1990/2008	Oh, Rapunzel
2003	Why Not a Sparrow
2004	All About a Girl
2005	Little Spirits
2008	Annie Lloyd
2015	Pulling Up Roots
2016	Some Dark Place
2017	Pizzly Bear
2019	We Were Hardly More Than Children
2020	I've Been Afraid
2021	AI and I

Condit considers the following films to be part of the "Jill Sands trilogy", which refers to three of her films which star the actress Jill Sands; Beneath the Skin, Possibly in Michigan, and Not a Jealous Bone.^[11]

Select Installations

Condit has created a number of video installations including:

• First Dream After Mother Died (2010), a three-channel video installation that was exhibited at the North Dakota Museum of Art^[12]
• Within a Stone's Throw (2012), a three-channel video installation exhibited at the Nevada Museum of Art,^[13] the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Burren College of Art in Ireland^[14]
• Tales of Future Past (2017), a two-channel video installation exhibited at the Lynden Sculpture Garden^[15]

Personal life

Condit has two grown sons, Schuyler Vogel, the chaplain at Carleton College, and Lloyd Vogel, chief executive officer at Garage Grown Gear.