Katrín Ólafsdóttir’s background is in dance and choreography, and she started making Super 8 films as a teenager. She has directed and produced several short films and documentaries and is currently in post-production of her first feature film, The Wind Blew On, made religiously with a homemade formula of Mutual Aid. Along with Bertrand Mandico, she is the founder of the film collective International/Incohérence. Katrín also does photographic work, video performances, and installations. She and collaborator Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir have been in the habit of taking over abandoned spaces and performing symbolic attacks. Katrín has exhibited in museums and galleries and has done installations in abandoned man-made structures.

The final form of Introspection, which premiered as a part of SFMOMA’s Art in Cinema series on May 2nd, 1947, is notable as it is likely the first abstracted dance films ever created.  A visual artist by training, Arledge began work on the film as a means of “adding time to painting” in 1941 and explored every facet of her Kodak Cine Special to do so, placing colored gels over her lenses, using matte inserts to double or triple expose parts of the frame and using a car’s reflective hubcap

Sara Kathryn Arledge’s work was groundbreaking for its time, though her films were not screened with much frequency until decades after their creation. In addition, Arledge was frequently institutionalized against her will for mental illness, highlighting the barriers faced by women artists working in patriarchal spaces.

Marian Van Tuyl was the founder of Mills College’s Dance Department (the second of its kind in the US) and the founder/editor of the IMPULSE journal, which was one of the first periodicals dedicated to dance scholarship. Van Tuyl met filmmaker Sidney Peterson (founder of the seminal SFAI film program) during the Art in Cinema screening series, which was foundational in catalyzing the creation and community of avant-garde film.

Van Tuyl and Peterson collaborated on two films. The first was Horror Dream, a reworking of a live piece featuring an innovative use of camera placement that disorients the viewer in the space and evokes a feeling of sleep paralysis (amplified by an early John Cage score).

Analívia Cordeiro was one of the first dance artists to utilize computers in composition and pioneered video art in Brazil and computer dance worldwide in the early 1970s. The relationship between interpretation and programming presupposes both predetermined and undetermined elements, stimulating the creativity of the dancers.

She presented her first computer composition, M3X3, at the Edinburgh International Festival at the age of 19.

This work is a mediated representation of a live performance that took place at Serramonte Shopping Mall in Daly City, just south of San Francisco. In the work, five dancers manipulated six movement phrases, interacting with six monitors in the public space featuring a live relay of events. At certain moments, the cameraperson and dancers would switch roles, and performers would frequently blend in with the movements of the crowd, who were likely unfamiliar with the type of performance they were seeing. The form of the work itself is presented as an interpretation of events rather than a strict documentation, expanding the creative potential of archival methods.

Deborah Mangum was a professor at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, which boasted an innovative dance program for its time. The school was acquired by a Jesuit university in 1978, at which point the dance department and nearly all records of it were eliminated.