DIGit Media Expo features DeeDee Halleck

Expo runs Aug. 19 through 27 NARROWSBURG, N.Y. - The DIGit Media Exposition 2006, a week-long series of media art programs sponsored by Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, will feature a talk and video presentation by filmmaker and media activist DeeDee Halleck. Halleck will appear on Friday, Aug. 25, from 7 to 9 p.m., at Sullivan County Community College’s Seelig Theatre, 112 College Road, Loch Sheldrake, N.Y. The recipient of three lifetime achievement awards: the George Stoney Award from the Alliance for Community Media; the Life Time Achievement Award of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), and the Herbert Schiller Award from the 2003 Schmio Awards, Halleck began making films in the early 1960’s, one of which, “Mural on Our Street,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965. In 1976, she was made codirector of the Child-Made Film Symposium, a 15-year worldwide assessment of media by youth. Since 1976, she has been active in producing programs for public access cable. In 1979, she founded Paper Tiger Television and then cofounded Deep Dish TV (DDTV), a satellite network of community-based video groups where she currently coproduces “Democracy Now in Exile’s War and Peace Report,” a daily news program with Downtown Community TV, Free Speech TV and the Independent Media Center. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. Her book, “Hand Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media,” is an anthology of essays and lectures over the past 40 years reflecting her range of involvement in alternative media making and community media production. This spring, the Whitney Museum chose Deep Dish TV’s program collection, “Shocking and Awful (2004-2005),” an examination of the highly controversial actions in Iraq, for inclusion in its two month exhibition, Biennial 2006: Day for Night. “Through the curatorial lens of the Biennial,” said curator Chrissie Iles, “Day for Night explores the artifice of American culture in what could be described as a pre-Enlightenment moment, in which culture is preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty. ” Halleck’s work has also appeared in the Austrian Triennial of Photography, the Wexner Center, the Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Bellevue Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. She has received a Guggenhiem and two Rockefeller Media Fellowships, among numerous awards. The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance created and produced the DIGit Media Arts Exposition in 2004 and 2005 to give artists an innovative context to produce and present their work, and to provide audiences with valuable and challenging content not otherwise available to them. DIGit 2006 is scheduled for seven Sullivan County locations from Aug. 19 to 27. Admission to the DeeDee Halleck presentation is $10, or included with a $25 DIGit pass to all events. For more information about this and other DIGIT events, or to purchase a pass, call 845-252-7576 or visit www.ArtsAllianceSite.org.