Cecelia Ann Condit[2] (born 15 December 1947) is an American video artist. Condit's films are noted for their attempts to subvert traditional mythologies of female representation and psychologies of sexuality and violence.
Condit has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Wisconsin Arts Council and National Media Award from the Retirement Research Foundation. Her work has been shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. In 2008, Condit had her first solo show exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation in New York.[3]
Condit served as professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.[4] Her work received renewed attention in 2015 after her short film Possibly in Michigan was posted to Reddit.[5] Four years later, an audio clip from the same film became a viral hit on TikTok, with over 22,000 iterations created as of July 2019.[6]
Beneath the Skin is her first work. A short film, it follows a woman's thoughts and musings towards a recent incident in which she discovered that her boyfriend was hiding the body of his ex-girlfriend in his closet.
It is based on a real-life incident that occurred in Condit's life when she dated Ira Einhorn, also known as the Unicorn Killer. Ira had murdered his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and hidden her corpse in his closet.[7] Condit, who began dating Einhorn, never found Maddux's corpse due to being on medication that hindered her sense of smell.[8]
Condit considers the following films to be part of the "Jill Sands trilogy", which refers to three of her films which star the actress Jill Sands; Beneath the Skin, Possibly in Michigan, and Not a Jealous Bone.[11]
Select Installations
Condit has created a number of video installations including:
First Dream After Mother Died (2010), a three-channel video installation that was exhibited at the North Dakota Museum of Art[12]
