Jill Goldman (b. 1962) is a Los Angeles based activist, filmmaker and artist whose work incorporates dance, performance, photography, film and video. Goldman is represented by ARCANE Space in Los Angeles, where she exhibited Fort/Da (2019), an immersive, multi-media installation and performance that blends personal narrative with fictional accounts of real women captured in contemporary iPhone snapshots and 19th century cabinet cards, and Memories of Places I Have Never Been (2020), an exhibit that investigates the death of her father by suicide when she was nine years old, and Disentanglement/Re-embodiment, a response to four years of research into patriarchy. Developed during a residency at Mildred’s Lane (2021), Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is an ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination. In videos, photographs and performances she interrogates the intangible ways that patriarchy creates fictions of the body and then insists that these fictions are natural, essentializing socially constructed traits as biologically and divinely determined, thereby simultaneously constructing and compelling gendered realities. Disentanglement/Re-embodiment has also been installed at Mildred’s Complexity (Fall, 2022), the LIMBO Festival in Tuscany (Summer, 2023), and at Serpent à Plume in Paris (Winter, 2024).
Goldman’s other work includes Before This There Was Something: A Ritual for Radical Transformation (2021), a video that depicts a tantric gesture created to dispel the lingering darkness of Trump’s four years in office and This, That and the Other: Dreams of to-be-looked-at-ness (2022) – a multimedia exploration of gender and gesture, shown at Salon at the Granada, which continues the artist’s practice of exploring memory and autobiography.
Goldman is currently a fellow at Mildred’s Lane, where in Summer of 2024, she will be gathering with artists, activists and writers to reimagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and systems of hierarchy and domination at the second annual Disentanglement/Re-Embodiment summer intensive residency session.
She received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from UCLA Film School. She is the director of the feature film Love is Like That, as well as many award-winning short films, including Fort/Da, Holding Margie’s Hand, Sally Goes Shopping, the music video for Lenny Kravitz’s Blues for Sister Someone, and the short documentary Genevieve, Girl Before the Mirror.