Jerry Tartaglia

is a filmmaker and writer whose work in Experimental Film and Queer Cinema spans four decades. He studied with the Abstract Expressionist Painter, Harry Koursaros, who introduced him to experimental film and the work of Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Gregory Markopoulos. Later, he co-founded Berks Filmmakers Inc, one of the longest surviving Micro-Cinema Showcases for Experimental Media Art in the U.S. In the 1970s he produced his now lost feature film, "Lawless" with Warhol Factory star Pope Ondine. He also assisted Tony Conrad in the manufacture & production of the Yellow Movie series in 1973. He was the first to write about the gay sensibility in American Avant-Garde film, published in The Millennium Film Journal in 1977. His Cinema is an ongoing examination of Identity and media politics through the moving image. The A.I.D.S. Trilogy (A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M., Ecce Homo, and Final Solutions) made during the early days of the epidemic in America, has been screened around the world. His work was included in the Century-end retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, "The Art of the 20th Century." Seven of his films have been premiered at the Berlinale since 1990. In 1993 he was one of the twelve artists who created the Red Ribbon as a symbol of A.I.D.S. awareness through the Artists' Caucus of Visual AIDS in NYC, paving the way for awareness ribbons of all kinds. In the early 1990s, he began the work of restoring and preserving the film legacy of Jack Smith. He reconstructed Smith's three feature films and eleven shorts for the Smith Estate and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. He teaches Cinema, writing, and media production and lives in a barn in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Photos by Daniel Feinberg