Maya Deren (1917-1961), filmmaker Born in Kiev, Russia, in 1917, Eleanora Derenkowsky emigrated to the United States with her parents in 1922. Encouraged by her mother to obtain a broad education, she attended L'Ecole Internationale in Geneva, Switzerland, Syracuse University (1933-35), New York University (1936), the New School for Social Research (1937-39), and Smith College (1939). She was national student secretary for the Young People's Socialist League in 1936 and a contributor to left-wing periodicals. Deren became Katherine Dunham's personal secretary and accompanied her on the national tour of Cabin in the Sky (1940-41). In 1942 Deren published an essay on dance in Haitian culture and married Alexander Hammid, a Czech cinematographer. With Hammid she produced Meshes of the Afternoon (1943); one of the most influential works in the American experimental film canon, it was credited with establishing the independent avant-garde film movement in the United States. Its innovative camera imagery and narrative structure depict a web of dream events that move between subjective and objective experience. In At Land, produced on her own in 1944, Deren used imaginative editing and camera techniques to express a trance state. Her films Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) have been repeatedly cited as significant achievements in the three-dimensional representation of dance movement on film.. In the unfinished film Witch's Cradle (1943), Deren explored Surrealist conceptions of time and space. In 1947 she became the first woman and the first American to win the Grand Prix International for avant-garde film at the Cannes Film Festival; she divorced Hammid the same year. She also published a monograph, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946). Lecturing, teaching, and writing extensively on independent film, she founded the Creative Film Foundation in 1955 to provide funding and support for independent filmmakers.. Deren traveled to Haiti in 1947 to research and film voudoun culture, work that became the basis for her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953). She produced the films Meditation on Violence (1948), a study of movement in Chinese martial arts, and The Very Eye of Night (1954), another major achievement in the filmic representation of dance. In 1960 she married Teiji Ito, a composer with whom she had collaborated since the mid-1950s. Deren died on October 13, 1961, leaving several major projects, including her film on Haiti, unfinished..
*taken from: http://women.eb.com/women/articles/Deren_Maya.html

-pretty picture baby