"Wilmouth’s works are not dance on film, but films that dance. Like Muybridge, Wilmouth is interested in the weird science of movies & conjuring up a soul from the cinematic machine"
- Bill Brown, Filmmaker
Biography
Danièle Wilmouth is fascinated by the unconscious choreography of ordinary life and how cinema reveals the miraculous spectacle of the everyday. She creates hybrid forms of film, video, installation, and live art that explore ritual, pattern, monotony, and impermanence. Her work investigates mediation of the choreographed body—constructing performances exclusively for the camera,
as well as experimental approaches to social issue documentary. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in Osaka, Japan, where she performed Butoh dance, and co-founded Hairless Films, a multi-national independent filmmaking collective.
Wilmouth's works have been exhibited at a variety of venues around the globe including the Kunst Museum Bonn, the National Gallery of Armenia, Television Canal+(a), Argentina, PBS WTTW, Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Tampere Short Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Cambridge International Film Festival, Siobhan Davies Studios, Dumbo Art Center, Echo Arts Cyprus, the American Dance Festival, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
A collection of her short films was included in the 2023 Chiayi International Art Documentary Film Festival in Taiwan. She was a featured ‘Artist in Focus’ at the 2022 Jumping Frames Hong Kong International Movement-Image Festival, as well as the 2016 BODY+ACT exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. In 2013, she was featured in Dance Films Association’s ‘Meet the Artist Series’ with a solo show at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Retrospectives of Wilmouth's works have been held in South Korea (2012, EXiS Film Festival, Korean Film Archives, Seoul), and Russia Russia (2004, St. Petersburg International Dance Film Festival). Danièle Wilmouth currently teaches Film, Video, New Media and Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Contact: Hairlessfilms at gmail dot com
