Lydia Greer is a visual artist whose layered, mixed media work includes sculptural and video installation, hand-made stop motion animation, single and multiple channel video, puppet theatre, and works with paper. She works with themes of allegory and euphemism in narrative structures exploring the languages of psychology and theatre. Lydia is interested in the most elaborate forms of storytelling as well as the narrative charge of everyday objects and how these communication ceremonies play out in the personal, spiritual and historical/political arena. Specifically, she is interested in personal acts of resistance and how the gestures of historical and spiritual trauma make themselves seen in visual and storytelling culture. Each project has its own diegetic story-world and involves complicated revisions featuring a transcendent historical character or taboo or unreliable story inviting audience engagement in narrative construction and play. From 2003-2007 she directed the LET'S DANCE SHADOW THEATRE, a handmade, ragtag puppet company in Portland, OR creating punk, feminist revisions of broadcast news and fairytales. Since then her multimedia/mixed media artwork and extended cinema performance work has been exhibited internationally and nationally most recently with commissions from The Exploratorium Museum (SF), Mamuta Art & Media Center (Jerusalem), Monkey Town (Brooklyn), Skowhegan School (NYC), Shapeshifter’s Cinema (Oakland), Other Cinema at ATA (San Francisco), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Royal NoneSuch Gallery (Oakland), Cabin Gallery (Chicago), Berkeley Center for New Media (Berkeley), Radar Productions (San Francisco), Museum of Human Achievement (Austin), ProArts (Oakland) and inclusion in The Channel of Democracy: Womanhood, Power & Freedom in Video Art, an all women video art exhibition at the International SF PhotoFairs 2018 at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture (San Francisco). In 2018, she was awarded a Media Arts Fellowship and Exhibition at Kala Art Institute (Berkeley) and has attended multiple residencies, most recently at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. She studied printmaking, drawing and time-based art at Portland State University (Portland, OR), was a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (New York City and Skowhegan, Maine) and earned her MFA in Mixed Media/New Genres at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. She has been an artist and consultant on multiple projects for the last decade with Unima Award winning ShadowLight Productions (Larry Reed, artistic director) in San Francisco (the art of shadow theatre for four decades), notably working on several major, large-scale, bilingual, interdisciplinary shadow theatre plays incorporating video, dance, sound, multiple hand-built lights, puppets, live actors and masks, notably Ghosts of the River written by Octavio Solis and Good For Nothing Lover (Isadora Duncan award) as well as shadow animation for film for Robin Lung’s feature documentary Finding Kukan which makes its broadcast premiere on PBS in April of 2018. Lydia is a founder and the Artistic Director of Facing West Shadow Opera: a collective of artists, filmmakers, and musicians hybridizing art forms including live opera, original animation, shadow theatre and found film to create unique performances, each akin to a living graphic novel with euphoria-inducing chamber music.
OLD SITE: https://facingwestshadowtheatre.wordpress.com/
NEW SITE: https://www.facingwestshadows.com/

Lydia has taught visual art, animation, film and film history/visual studies for over 15 years on the West Coast and lives and works in the East San Francisco Bay Area, California