Nina Danino was born in Gibraltar and studied Foundation and Painting at St. Martin’s School of Art (1973-1977) and Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art (1979-1981) London, where she used slide/tape and 16mm film. In the multi-media, two screen work, First Memory (1980-1981) she combined the subjective voice and narrative with formal and structural approaches to the moving and still image as a means of enabling a feminine perspective.

She made 16mm experimental films in the ambit of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Her films 1981-1987 combined elliptical and observational narrative to inscribe and defer the representation of the woman. Her films 1990-1997 mix religious iconography with psychoanalysis as a discourse and the use of performative voice and song. Stabat Mater (1990) is considered a seminal film of the British avant-garde. Her films “lead us on journeys through altered states, religious experiences and emotional landscapes,sometimes to the edge of the representable” (Helen De Witt). In her film soundtracks she has collaborated with singers including New York experimental vocalist Shelley Hirsch in “Now I am yours” (1993) with Tuvan vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak and English soprano Catherine Bott in the landscape feature film Temenos (1997).

Her work also returns to the ephemeral aspects of place and the Mediterranean geography. Meteorologies (2013) is a small book and audio work about weather and the memory of a disappeared place.

Her recent works 2010-2016 are Communion (2010), a silent film portrait, shot on 35mm, black and white photographed by Billy Williams BSC. Jennifer (2015) is a feature-length documentary of an enclosed Carmelite nun in Spain and Sorelle Povere di Santa Chiara (2015-16) is single-channel video, 6-channel sound installation and a silent 16mm film made in collaboration with the enclosed monastic community of Sorelle Povere in Italy.

Her films have been broadcast and screened at cinemas, festivals and museums worldwide. Visionary Landscapes, is an illustrated volume on her work by Black Dog Publishing (2005). “..and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens” is an essay on place and her films published by Mousse Publishing (2013). Her body of work is in the collection of the British Film Institute National Film Archive.

Nina Danino has taken part in many conferences and talks on experimental film. She was a member of the editorial collective of the journal Undercut (1982-1998) and is Co-editor of the Undercut Reader (2002). Her current research is in women’s experimental narrative film and on the material practices and the context of women’s experimental narrative film at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op.

Nina Danino lives and works in London. She is Reader in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Credits