Janene Higgins is a graphic designer and video artist living in New York City. Since 1996, her videos and digital media have been presented in numerous film & video festivals throughout the world, including New York and Chicago's Underground Film Festivals, The Barcelona Festival of Independent Video, Art Institute of Chicago, The Impakt Festival in Holland, New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires, The Hamburg Short Film Festival, and at New York's Irving Plaza.
Her videos are a direct offshoot of her graphic design, incorporating collage, text, and image layering into a time-based artform. Long a fan of the computer and all its possibilities, she was introduced to video via Quicktime movies. Her video work today is generated from a combination of analog and digital methods.
A foray into live video brought performances with such artists as Ikue Mori, Vernon Reid, Elliott Sharp, Prema Murthy, Alan Licht, and Zeena Parkins. "Arch", a live music/live video piece with Parkins, premiered at Roulette, New York City and was taped for Roulette TV in 2001. Their first full-length work, "Artificial Eye" was performed at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany; at Music Unlimited in Wels, Austria; and at the City of Women festival in Slovenia. Higgins has given workshops on her approach to video performance at A.I.R. gallery, NYC ("Women/Talk/Art/Technology" series) and at the Watson festival at Carnegie Mellon University.
She holds a bachelor's degree from The State University of New York at Albany, and has worked professionally as a graphic artist in New York since 1986, initially in editorial design. She has designed for such magazines as Esquire, Working Woman, and Fame, culminating in three years as Assistant Art Director of Vanity Fair. Her work has been featured in Communication Arts and Art Direction magazine. In 1995, she left the magazine world to start her own studio of graphic design and pursue a new interest in video. Her graphic work now centers primarily on the music world. She has designed over 75 CD packages for such clients as Island Records, RCA Victor, TVT, London Records, and a wide variety of independent labels.
From 1996 to 1998, Higgins organized seven events for P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center's Clocktower Gallery in Tribeca, NYC. These included "Release", an evening of solo performances by a sampling of New York's preeminent noise musicians; and "Timebomb", a four-night series of music, poetry, film/video, and cyberculture. This series was documented in the CD release Timebomb: Live At The Clocktower Gallery issued by PS1 Contemporary Art Center
RECENT ACTIVITIES: May 2003, duo with guitar god and personal hero Elliott Sharp, as part of the "Not Still Art Festival", Brooklyn. April 2003, "Ombra", collaboration with composer Ernesto Klar. December 2002, duo performances with Alan Licht and with Ikue Mori; soulful rhythmic rock and glorious soundscape, respectively. A frequent artist-in-residence at The Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, Higgins was a recent recipient of their Finishing Funds grant.
