At once tender and savage, Dani Leventhal's video diaries capture the banal and the horrific to reveal the transcendent beauty and pain of daily life. In the award-winning Draft 9 (2003), Leventhal cuts between skinned animals, salsa dancers, a Holocaust-survivor, and her own romantic liaisons to create, in the words of critic Genevieve Yue, "something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch." In Show and Tell in the land of Milk & Honey (2007), Leventhal juxtaposes bucolic shots of farm life with tales of sexual harassment and sick chickens while living and working in Israel. Her video Skim Milk & Soft Wax is part-fiction part-documentary. Leventhal studied sculpture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College. She received the Visual Arts Award from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and produced a limited edition book and video, Skim Milk and Soft Wax at the Women's Studio Workshop with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2011, she received the Wexner Center for the Arts Capital R Award.
Leventhal was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1972. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
"Dani's videos remind us that the people she encounters are holy or part of a higher world. She reminds us that we are part of that world, in the sense that Helene Cixous says that we cannot keep ourselves from being divine... Dani's focus, framing composition and editing accumulate this transcendent quality in the body... These unrehearsed and unstaged moments seem miraculous. They are records of the impossible merging of circles, disparate moments and lives."
--Bryan Saner, Goat Island Performance Group
