Growing Sideways: Ericka Beckman, Piper Marshall, Isaac Preiss, Jeff Preiss

Isaac Preiss is a PhD student in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. Informed by work in queer and transgender studies, his work focuses on visual media experimentations that challenge conventions around personal accounts, testimonies, and narrative.

Jeff Preiss has been widely active since the 1980s as a filmmaker, cinematographer, curator, and visual artist. Through the '80s and '90s he was co-director of the East Village venue Films Charas and a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema. His films from this time were restored and preserved in 2014 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His films have been screened internationally. Highlights include: the Rem Koolhaas-commissioned 33 Sequences Spanning Four Trips to the Site of the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (for the OMA retrospective Content), the 2012 experimental feature STOP (50th New York Film Festival selection), 2014’s feature film Low Down (Sundance award for cinematography; Karlovy Vary, Best Actress), the 2019 MoMA premiere of 14 Standard 8mm Reels, as well as collaborative works made with artists including Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and Anthony McCall. Recent solo exhibitions include: More Than I Looked For (2020), Stedelijk Museum, and ORCHARD Documents (2023), Celmentin Seedorf, Köln.

Piper Marshall is an art historian, curator, and critic whose practice combines rigorous research with exhibition-making. She leads innovative, interdisciplinary work on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art and technology. She has served on curatorial teams for Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (2024) and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Additional exhibitions and collaborations include: Media and Mind Control (2025); Growing Sideways: Artists Performing Childhood (2024); Laurie Simmons: Clothes Make the Man (2018); Nina Chanel Abney: Safe House (2017); Judith Barry: Imagination Dead Imagine (2017); Silke Otto Knapp: Monotones (2017); Fia Backstrom: Woe Men Keep Going (2017); Sinister Feminism (2017); Judith Bernstein: Voyeur (2015); Ericka Beckman: You The Better (2015). She has written and lectured widely, contributing numerous essays and articles on the work of Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Eric N. Mack, Ed Atkins, and Carolyn Lazard. She has taught at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. From 2014-2018, she served as an independent curator at Mary Boone Gallery. From 2007-2013, she was a curator at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York. Marshall earned her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Columbia University and her BA from Barnard College.

Ericka Beckman has been an acclaimed filmmaker since being named the Village Voice Vanguard artist of 1979. Energetic pacing, simple, special effects, and chanted, percussive soundtracks distinguish the artist’s films. Beckman has been the subject of monographic exhibitions: Super-8 Trilogy (2018), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Game Mechanics (2017) Le Secession, Vienna; and Double Reverse (2019), List Gallery MIT, Cambridge. Her films are held within the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Anthology Film Archives in New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, The High Museum, Atlanta; the British Film Institute, London; and Light Cone, Paris.