Michèle Clarke
Filmmaker, photographer and performance artist. A Trinidad-born media artist, Michele Clarke was named, by NOW magazine, one of Toronto’s 10 best Filmmakers of the Year in 2006, and the following year she won the Best Canadian Female Short Award at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film and Video Festival for her video Black Men and Me. In this award-winning film, Clarke explores her position as a Trinidadian dyke and her complex relationship with black men. Shot in a barbershop, a traditional gathering place for black men, she has her head shaved while she reflects on her black masculinity (1). That year she also released a film she made in 2003, Surrounded by Water (2003, 2), an experimental documentary about home and where you come from. Shot in Super8 and edited in digital video, this film was screened as part of LIFT’s Guerilla Filmmaking for Absolute Beginners workshop. In 2012, a year after her mother passed away, she began working on a documentary short entitled The Grief Trilogy and a photo series named It’s Good to Be Needed, in order to deal with her loss and her subsequent dark thoughts and feelings. As of 2014, Clarke sat on the boards of the Feminist Art Gallery and Gallery 44, and was pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto.