Stanya Kahn

Stanya Kahn (born 1968) is an American video artist. She graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State University and received an MFA in 2003 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Kahn lives and works in Los Angeles, California.[1]

Kahn's work intertwines personal and universal pain with off-the-wall humor, blurring the lines between fiction and document. She uses tightly written scripts in addition to her trained improvisation to complement her documentary-style and experimental videos. Kahn is often the main subject of her films, portraying lowly, powerless characters, which she hopes audiences can relate to.[2]

Previous to and during her collaboration with Harry Dodge, Kahn made solo performance works and collaborated with performers and choreographers Keith Hennessy, the dance troupe CORE, and Ishmael Houston Jones, touring live shows worldwide from 1992-2000.[3] Kahn starred in and was a contributing writer for the independent feature film By Hook or By Crook (2001), which won numerous awards and was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival.[4]

Outside of video, Kahn's writings have appeared in journals including Nothing Moments, LTTR and Movement Research. She has taught as adjunct faculty in New Genres at UCLA, Photo/Media at Cal Arts, Visual Arts/Media and Critical Gender Studies at UCSD, and has taught in the MFA programs at USC and UCLA.[5] Her 2014 solo show, Die Laughing, consisted of her film Don't Go Back to Sleep and accompanying paintings and drawings.[6]

Kahn's newest film, No Go Backs (2020), is unlike her previous works. Instead of a script-driven comedy, Kahn's son and his friend silently navigate a post-apocalyptic city.[7] Though the artist filmed No Go Backs before COVID-19, her video is full of emptiness with glimmers of possibility: a fitting theme amidst the pandemic.[8]

In the early 1990s, Kahn met Harry Dodge, a video artist. The two began collaborating at Bard College in 2002.[9] Because of Kahn's history in performance art and Dodge's film experience, the duo mostly consisted of Dodge behind the camera and Kahn in front of it.[9]

Their comedic videos satirize the awkwardness of art-making, video, and gender and are often deemed strange and ludicrous. In Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out (2006), Kahn is a bloody-nosed valkyrie, holding a foam cheese block and babbling down the streets of Los Angeles. Beyond their humor, Kahn and Dodge's videos touch upon the darker seriousness of trauma, privilege, and politics.[10]

Among several other museums and events, Kahn and Dodge's work has been shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally, including:[5]

• The 2008 Whitney Biennial
• The 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art
• Getty Center, Los Angeles
• Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
• The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Sundance Film Festival, Utah

• 2012 – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship[11]
• 2012 – Jury Prize: Best Short, Narrative Fiction, Migrating Forms Film Festival[1]
• 2013 – Artadia Award, Los Angeles[12]
• 2015 – San Francisco Art Institute Artist-in-Residence[13]

• Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's Ubuweb video page
• Stanya Kahn's website
• Vielmetter Los Angeles' page

• Bell, Natalie & Burton, Johanna (2017). Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. New York, NY: New Museum. ISBN 9780915557165.
• Kahn and Dodge's interview with Michael Smith in Bomb Magazine
• Phillips, Glenn (2008). California Video: Artists and Histories. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute. ISBN 9780892369225.