Lana Lin (b. 1966) is a filmmaker, artist, and scholar based in New York City. Since the early 1990s, she has made experimental films, videos, and documentaries that examine the politics of identity and cultural translation, informed by the poetic and conceptual qualities of moving image media.
Lin's film The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018) won Best Feature Documentary at the 2019 San Diego Asian Film Festival and Favorite Experimental Film at the 2019 BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia. Lin is also the author of Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
Her works have been screened and exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum, New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, BAMcinemaFest in Brooklyn, and the Gasworks Gallery in London. Lin was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) from 2000 to 2001.
Since 2001, Lin has worked collaboratively with artist H. Lan Thao Lam as the artist team Lin + Lam, developing mixed media research-based projects concerning the construction of history and collective memory.
Lin is a professor at The New School, New York City.
Early life and education
Lin was born in Montreal, Canada in 1966. Lin is of Taiwanese descent, with both her parents being from Taiwan. When she was two years old, Lin's family moved from Canada to the US where she grew up, living in the Chicago suburb, Naperville, Illinois. As such, Lin identifies as Taiwanese American or Asian American in nationality.
In 1988, Lin obtained a BA in Communication studies with an emphasis in Film Production from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. The same year, she came to New York to work on a documentary for the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, also taking on production assistant roles on other film sets. Lin then attended Bard College where she obtained an MFA in Film in 1996. At Bard, Lin was affiliated with an emerging group of artists and filmmakers, such as Matthew Buckingham, Sadie Benning, Jennifer Montgomery, and Julie Zando.
Lin spent several years studying psychoanalysis at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), later bringing this knowledge into her art and research. She later earned her PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in 2015.
In terms of gender, Lin identifies as queer.
Career
Lin has made experimental films, documentaries, and videos since the early 1990s. Lin made several 16 mm found footage films in 1992, such as Sphere:Circle:Round, Through the Door, and I Begin to Know You. Her found footage films were included in William C. Wees' 1993 book, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, as works that are "representative" of the found footage genre.
Other 16 mm films would follow, such as Mizu Shobai (Water Business) (1993), Stranger Baby (1995), and Almost the Cocktail Hour (1997). Lin replicated the visuals from videotapes for Taiwan Video Club (1999), a film following a community of Asian immigrants who recorded and exchanged videotapes of serial Taiwanese dramas.
From about 1999, Lin's practice also began to encompass the contexts of art and writing. Her film Almost the Cocktail Hour (1997) was screened as part of the MoMA's Cineprobe program in 1999. In February 2000, early films by Lin, such as Sphere:Circle:Round (1992), Through the Door (1992), and I Begin to Know You (1992), were screened at the Whitney Museum's film program, The Cool World: Film & Video in America 1950–2000, as part of the exhibition The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000. Later in September 2000, Stranger Baby (1995) was screened alongside works by Maya Deren, Peggy Ahwesh, and Yoko Ono at the Whitney Museum as part of their film series The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought: Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America, 1930–2000.
For a commission by Cabinet Magazine, Lin developed the web art project everything is not the same (2000). Her new films from this period included No Power to Push Up the Sky (2001) and Mysterial Power (2002).
Lin was a fellow at the Whitney ISP from 2000 to 2001 under the Studio Program. Lin met the artist H. Lan Thao Lam in 2000. By 2001, they began working collaboratively as the artist team Lin + Lam, developing multi-disciplinary research-based projects concerning the construction of history and collective memory.