Suzie Silver
Professor | Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, UNITED STATES
Suzie Silver has been creating queer performance and video art for more than two decades.
Biography
Suzie Silver has been creating queer performance and video art for more than two decades. Her well-known early videos, "Freebird" and "A Spy" emerged from her involvement with the performance art scene in Chicago in the late '80s and early '90s. Her later videos employ digital collage to meld together appropriated images and music, recorded performance and animated sequences into irreverent celebrations of exoticism, ecstasy and camp. Her current projects include Trans-Q Television — a playful and provocative, collaboratively created, video variety show celebrating the multiplicities of genders and sexualities; and with Hilary Harp, Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale video series for queers of all ages (and their friends, too). All of Silver’s work alludes to the capacity for desire to disrupt social boundaries and imagine new futures.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Queer Performance
Trans-Q Television
Video Art
Performance Art
Genders and Sexualities
Media Appearances (3)
When They Go Low, We Go Sideways: Finding Queer Light in Dark Times
Pride Source online
2023-06-13
Making these light videos was a heavy task for Rubnitz — figuratively and literally. Somehow, his videos capture the playfulness of the nightlife scene at its most potent, despite all the trouble around. The equipment at his disposal was cumbersome and expensive. Suzie Silver, professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, explains: “A 3/4 portable U-Matic video system could easily weigh 20 pounds or so. On top of that, the equipment was really expensive. A basic system would cost at least a few thousand dollars.”
Weekend Short Film Festival Gives Folklore A Queer Spin
90.5 WESA online
2018-05-10
Drawing on some of that anarchic primal energy, Fairy Fantastic is an art initiative by artists and educators Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver that aims to use the form and content of folklore to illuminate queerness, including different types of gender expressions and unconventional family relationships.
The Trans-Q Live! performance showcase returns
Pittsburgh City Paper online
2015-09-16
The show is produced by Scott Andrew, Adil Mansoor and Suzie Silver, but its title can be somewhat misleading, acknowledges Silver, who’s an art professor at Carnegie Mellon University. While the program has a queer-community focus, she says, “We are interested in more radical expressions of gender and desire as an artist than [in] someone’s sexuality.”
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