About

Bio

Charlotte is a process. They are an experimental animator and documentary filmmaker whose research centers around community building through media making. They hold a BA from the University of Florida, and an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa. They are the co-founder and President of Mechanical Eye Microcinema, a non-profit that aims to create equitable access to filmmaking, where they collaboratively organize Fierce Flix, a social justice project that provides mentorship, film education, and leadership development to LGBTQIA+ and female youth. Charlotte currently teaches Media Arts at Warren Wilson College.

Artist Statement

I make art to connect - to myself, to my community, to people I have yet to meet - and filmmaking is my favorite way to communicate. I think in movement and frames. I am fascinated by discovery and driven to understanding how we see, how things move, and how images become emotion. 

My work is both personal and public.  I am most interested in the ways in which my art provides opportunities to share ideas with others - performing looped projections from the space of the audience, designing optical toys with windows to reveal the mechanics, hand-crafting stereoscopic films that invite the viewer to play with their glasses. For me, this transparency of process is ultimately about community: sitting in a darkened room, watching what is always the past (because all light is the past and all cinema is a history), creating communities of filmmakers and enthusiasts so we can reimagine the future together.

I create one frame at a time. My work is about process; whether I’m experimenting with animation techniques, darkroom practices, optical toys, or projection, I’m drawn to imperfection and the ways that the delicate authenticity of the hand-crafted image disrupts the machine of cinema - my humanity queering the camera’s mathematical, mechanical eye.  My animated fiction practice draws myth from memory. My non-fiction films are love letters at 24 frames per second to broken hearts, distant friends, and people I have yet to become. Looping time in boxed, curtained, and uncontained frames, my new media and expanded cinema work returns to traditions in order to reinvent the wheel and reimagine futures. I am interested in taking cinema apart, in order to put it back together - not the same, not seamless and taken for granted, but at the foreground of how we connect through image.

My recent practice has grown out of this interest in materiality, but centers connection through content as much as craft. For me, art is deeply personal. I want to create opportunities for collective remembering in a way that isn’t about nostalgia, but rediscovery. I want my art to look at the world, at myself, as though through a microscope until it all abstracts into shape, and then reforms into feeling. I am playing with the camera, experimenting with light, sculpting in time in order to reach across the chasms that we imagine separate us, and together, find ways to connect.