Alison O'Daniel

What excites you most about joining the UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities community?

UC San Diego has a powerful legacy of experimental and conceptual art and film, and I am honored to join and build upon that. I’m thrilled about the Suraj Israni Center and the new cinematic arts focus. My deepest passion is expanding how students, audiences and filmmakers encounter narrative through embodied experience. Related to this, I am also really excited about the many people across the university doing groundbreaking work in disability justice. I am d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing and can’t wait to work with and alongside many of these incredible scholars prioritizing and expanding modes of access.

What drew you to you choose your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

I have always been exploring embodiment through various mediums in visual and performing arts. In my childhood and teenage years, I was a competitive figure skater and transitioned into theater and art in high school. I went to art school and there sculpture, installation, performance, video and film directing gave me confidence to figure out how to listen deeply to my body and other d/Deaf bodies. I have been deaf/Hard of Hearing since birth and all of these art forms help me understand the social strata of sound, hearing, d/Deafness and listening.

The arts and humanities offer a profound engagement for living a deep, conscientious and fulfilled life, even today in this strange moment. In film, even if it’s extremely minimal, something is always happening and it’s happening in a particular way. This mirrors and is formed by (and sometimes also forms) the world we live in. Art is a space to analyze and study what is unfolding in our interior and exterior worlds and thrillingly gives us permission to contemplate the method, the mode, the madness of an experience. When we bravely look at our role and participation in art-making, we become highly capable and culpable in the formation of this world.

What research or creative project are you working on currently?

I am currently in development on my second feature film “Inframince.” Inframince, a french word coined by surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, refers to ultra-thin, ephemeral, undecidable phenomena – such as the warmth on a chair after a person stands or differences in objects cast from the same mold. In “Inframince,” I hope to examine the design, artifacting, control and weaponization of not only sound and hearing, but also the space between a person’s articulation of a deeply personal and often subtle experience and how and if they are believed or taken seriously by the social, medical, and political infrastructures that exist to support them. My film’s subject is the intertwining of ableism and the ‘inframince’ of an often unprovable experience.

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

I love any opportunity to broaden students’ media, cinematic and narrative literacy so as to enable (and persuade) them to expand and stretch cinematic norms (and not just copy and repeat the past). It’s a young medium and there is still so much for us to do with it. This is a seemingly small thing, but I really believe it has significant implications for all of our shared futures. That being said, I am most gratified and moved by supporting students throughout the final stages of post-production on a capstone or thesis project. Though exhausted, they can see the fruits of their labor. It is an empowering moment after spending so much time being vulnerable and not knowing if their film will work. I love giving them a little (or epic) push to find creative solutions they didn’t originally envision, and then to get themselves and their film out into the world 

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

I think I already gave this away with the ice skating comment above.

Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles, Calif. She is d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing and explores access and complex embodiment.

O'Daniel has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha.

She has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation. She has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

O’Daniel was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Articles on her work have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; Artforum; Los Angeles Times; BOMB; and ArtReview, among others.

O’Daniel’s film “The Tuba Thieves” premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and has been included in many other festivals, including MOMA Doc Fortnight, CPH Dox, SFFILM, Sydney Film Festival, Kaleidoskop, Biografilm, and others. O’Daniel is a United States Artist/Mellon Foundation 2022 Disability Futures Fellow, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video, and a 2019 Creative Capital fellow.

She received an MFA from UC Irvine (2010), a postgraduate diploma in fine arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2005), and a bachelor’s degree from Cleveland Institute of Art (2003).