Film Maker
She used her artistic talent to explore and portray the creative minds of others.
BR was born in New York City. Her mother was a teacher. Her father was a lawyer. She graduated from an alternative public high school at which students designed their own curricula based on experiential learning, mostly through internships.
BR interned with a fashion photographer while earning an undergraduate degree in media arts from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she also taught for 15 years, and a Master’s in Fine Arts (M.F.A.) from the Royal College of Art in London.
BR spent ten years in Paris, working as a graphic designer for fashion companies before returning to New York to be closer to her family while hoping to pursue her artistic interests and earn a living at the same time.
A classmate during BR’s academic arts years described BR’s creativity: “While the rest of us were stealing (ideas) from our instructors and other design (celebrities), BR was on her own journey, working with delicate typography and haunting images, creating collages and photo-illustrations that were uniquely hers.”
BR described herself as an experimental biographer and a cinematic diarist. She conducted oral history interviews of unusually talented people plus with people who knew the person or were moved by another person’s work and then took that soundtrack and, using her background in graphic design, created abstract images. What she wanted to do was to take you into the mind of geniuses, imagine their thought processes and present that visually in short films about eccentric and unusual minds – like John Nash the mathematician, Buckminster Fuller the architect and Edwin Land, who invented Polaroid film.
To finance her projects, she persuaded the subjects to donate their time and others to donate their work on her films, though she always offered to pay. She was able to bring together some very talented people, even though she had no money, by trade or barter, whatever was necessary. Her interview subjects and co-workers appreciated her sincerity in presenting the thought processes of creative people. And she never forgot to thank people for their assistance, usually with handwritten notes, often hand delivered in decorated paper bags.
Always an inquisitive mind, BR was fascinated by the minds of dogs, inspired by her adopted, behaviorally challenged dog from a shelter. One friend described BR as a scientist in an artist’s body, always interested in the mystery of things.
(from a NY Times obit)
