Jean Carlomusto

Jean Carlomusto's personal works are unorthodox investigative reports on subjects that have been erased from history. In L is for the Way You Look (producer/director), and Not Just Passing Through (co-producer/director), she pieced together lesbian history using whatever scraps of gossip and memory that she could find.  In To Catch A Glimpse, she delved into her family history by trying to find out if the rumors about her grandmother's death in 1939 from a botched abortion were true.  Her celebrated work, Shatzi Is Dying is a multilayered treatise exploring queer culture, AIDS politics, life and death, which traces a narrative of the numerous near-death experiences of a beloved rescue dog. Monte Cassino, explores the long-term effects of war trauma on civilians by transposing her father's childhood experience of being trapped on a battlefield with the more recent events of 9/11/01, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her documentaries have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums and on television. Jean Carlomusto has created numerous videotapes about HIV/AIDS over the past 15 years.  In 1987, she founded the Media Production Unit at Gay Men's Health Crisis. She was a member of the Testing the Limits AIDS Video Collective and DIVA TV. She and Jane Rosett have co-curated an interactive AIDS Archive entitled AIDS: A Living Archive, which ran at the Museum of the City of New York from April - September, 2001. She is an associate professor of Media Arts at Long Island University. (7/07)

L Is For The Way You Look
A film by Jean Carlomusto, 1991, 24 min., Color
L IS FOR THE WAY YOU LOOK is a playful exploration of lesbian history and the women who have served as role models and objects of desire for young les...