Excerpt from 28 minute biography
Steve Zehentner: Producer, Co-director/editor, Director of Photography
Jack Waters works in all forms of visual, performance and media art. He is a BFA graduate in dance of the Juilliard School. His choreography credits include his Personifications staged for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center Repertory Workshop, and his works created as a founding member of POOL, the choreographer’s collective that was the resident dance company of the legendary Pyramid Club in New York City of the 1980s.
Jack’s films have shown on Sundance Channel, and on PBS. Among Waters recent screenings of note is his video short “Occupy My Ass, Not Iraq” at the Panorama section of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. As a journalist he has published articles on politics, cultural affairs, and reviews in visual arts, film, and media. He was a founding contributing writer for both Gay City News, New York City’s LGBT news bi-weekly, and Color Life, the news journal for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and two-spirited people of Color.
Waters and partner Peter Cramer, former co-directors of ABC No Rio, are co founders of Le Petit Versailles, a Green Thumb garden presenting screenings, music, performance, visual art exhibitions, and new media. They are ongoing and frequent collaborators with the Inbred Hybrid Collective, whose mandate is: to stimulate a consciousness of the external factors affecting our human existence. http://alliedproductions.org
The Jack Waters Biography was produced by The Lower East Side Biography Project and was directed and edited by Justin O. Silverman and Steve Zehentner in collaboration with Penny Arcade.
The Lower East Side Biography Project was created in 1999 by performance artist Penny Arcade and video producer Steve Zehentner as an ongoing biography series and oral history archive. The LES Bio Project’s biographies and archive will help to ensure that future generations have access to the mad souls of invention and rebellion that built the Lower East Side’s international reputation as an incubator for authenticity and iconoclasm in art, culture and politics.
The project seeks to stem the tide of cultural amnesia by bridging the cultural gap between long time residents and newcomers to the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side. To this end, the LES Bio Project has a community-media training component where young filmmakers are trained in production and post-production technologies and then become shepherds of an individual oral history that they edit into a 28-minute biography. Since its inception, the LES Bio Project has trained over forty individuals, completed forty 28-minute biographies, videotaped dozens more interviews and live events.
The completed biographies are cablecast and streamed live every Monday at 11 p.m EST on Time Warner Cable Channel 34 and on Manhattan Neighborhood Network Community Channel One.
http://www.mnn.org/live/1-community-channel
View the current livestream and cablecast schedule on the project’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/LowerEastSideBiographyProject…