Amy Taubin will continue to write about a wide range of motion pictures—avant-garde films, moving image installations, fictional narratives, documentaries, and the on-going hybridizations of these forms—as digital technology transforms the history of film and its future. Among her preoccupations: What does it mean to makers and viewers that we now have the time machine of cinema available on our home screens given how grave the omissions from this vast archive are? What does it mean that people can speak truth to power with their mobile phone cameras? Taubin plans a series of essays on artists whose work marries innovative form and progressive sociopolitical content, among them Garrett Bradley, Arthur Jafa, Marina Zurkow, Peggy Ahwesh and the visionary actor and TV series showrunner Michaela Coel.
Amy Taubin has spent sixty years watching and thinking about time-based media—not only narrative, documentary, and experimental film, but also performance, theater, and other artworks that have a media component, or are shaped by and for digital or film exhibition. Taubin was integral to the reshaping of the CAPS multimedia program in the 1970s to fund performance and conceptual works by artists including LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Ken Jacobs, Bill Beckley, and Vito Acconci. In the mid-1980s, she was the Video and Film Curator of the Kitchen in New York City. After completing her MA in Cinema Studies at New York University, Taubin began to write for The Soho Weekly News in the late 1970s, choosing journalism over academia. For fourteen years, she wrote full-time for the Village Voice. Taubin is currently a contributing editor at Artforum and Sight and Sound and, until its recent “hiatus,” at Film Comment.