MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, professor at Parsons at the New School and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Since 1982, MM Serra has created over 31 films.
Select 2021 Screenings included Body as Playground, Body as Battleground: Sexuality and the Female Gaze curated by Tessa Hughes-Freeland at Howl! Happening and a retrospective of her entitled MM Serra: Portraits curated by Devon Narine-Singh.
In 2021 she completed Endless Possibilities: Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. The film is a portrait of two artists, dancers, musicians, community gardeners, collaborators and lovers, who have lived together on the Lower East Side of New York City for more than 40 years. Presciently, it presents plagues, disease and the breakdown of communication just as Covid19 exploded into New York consciousness. The film screened at international festivals and venues including Mimesis Documentary Festival and as part of Soft Network’s Artists on Camera 1967-2021 which screened virtually at Metrograph.
MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, professor at Parsons at the New School and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. Since 1982, MM Serra has created over 31 films.
Select 2021 Screenings included Body as Playground, Body as Battleground: Sexuality and the Female Gaze curated by Tessa Hughes-Freeland at Howl! Happening and a retrospective of her entitled MM Serra: Portraits curated by Devon Narine-Singh.
In 2021 she completed Endless Possibilities: Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. The film is a portrait of two artists, dancers, musicians, community gardeners, collaborators and lovers, who have lived together on the Lower East Side of New York City for more than 40 years. Presciently, it presents plagues, disease and the breakdown of communication just as Covid19 exploded into New York consciousness. The film screened at international festivals and venues including Mimesis Documentary Festival and as part of Soft Network’s Artists on Camera 1967-2021 which screened virtually at Metrograph.
Another film completed in August 2021, Tales and Visions of the Community with MM Serra, is the first in a series of works exploring the concepts and ideas of underground artists working in collaboration. The first film focused on FMC founder Jonas Mekas and premiered at IRL Gallery in September 2021.
Awards include a 2016 grant from the New York Council for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. Serra’s film A Lot of Fun For the Evil One is catalogued at The Library of Congress under Jazz on the Screen by David Meeker. On June 6th, 2013, MM Serra was a recipient of the Kathy Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement of Excellence in Avant-Garde Art. She received a second Kathy Acker Lifetime Achievement Award (The Purple Heart Award) in 2021.
A compilation DVD of her work and writings (including her Fall 2018 Framework article The Films of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body) that was released at the end of 2020 by RE:VOIR in Paris.
In August 2020 at the request of the National Gallery of Art founding film curator Peggy Parsons, she curated a 60 year online exhibition entitled New York Pavements. The exhibition featured works by Joseph Cornell, Coleen Fitzgibbion, Jonas Mekas and including her film NYC (1985).
Her writings have appeared in Framework Journal, Millennium Film Journal and other publications. Her chapter on the work of Carolee Schneemann, titled “Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann”, was published in Anthology of Experimental Filmmakers by Duke University Press in 2007, and a second printing in 2008.
Since 1993 as Executive Director of Film-Makers’ Cooperative, she has overseen hundreds of restorations including internegatives for Maya Deren, Storm De Hirsch’s City Songs, multiple collaborations with VanDerBeek Estate and Cathy Cook’s The Match That Started My Fire. She was instrumental in the restoration and distribution of Edward Owen’s work.
Serra lives and works in New York, where she continues to curate programs, make films, and create community.
