Events Calendar

Moving Images: A Conversation with Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham

Admission is free.

Reception to follow.


Since the mid-1970s, internationally recognized artist Laurie Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, dummies, mannequins and, occasionally, people to create images with intensely psychological subtexts. In 2006, she produced and directed her first film, The Music of Regret starring Meryl Streep. Lena Dunham, director of the film Tiny Furniture, is one of today’s most talented young filmmakers. Simmons and Dunham are also mother and daughter. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Simmons plays Dunham’s mother in Tiny Furniture, which is filmed in Simmons’s real home/studio. Join us as Simmons and Dunham come together for a fun and fascinating conversation about narrative, genre and image making across generations.

About the Artists

Laurie Simmons’s photographic-based works are collected by many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Hara Museum in Tokyo. Simmons was featured in Season 4 of the PBS series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Her most recent exhibition was at Salon 94 Bowery, NYC, entitled The Love Doll: Days 1–30.

Lena Dunham has quickly established herself as a formidable talent among today’s top young filmmakers. At only 24 years old, Dunham wrote, directed and starred in her second feature film, Tiny Furniture, which won Best Narrative Feature at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival and received Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. Dunham is currently working on the HBO comedy series Girls. She created the series and directed the pilot and three additional episodes. In addition to starring in Girls, she will serve as executive producer and writer.

Organized by Rochelle Steiner (Dean, Fine Arts) and Howard Rodman (Cinematic Arts).

For further information on this event:
visionsandvoices@usc.edu

Location: School Of Cinematic Arts (SCA) - The Ray Stark Family Theatre (SCA 108)

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Daria Yudacufski