
Directing
Cheryl Donegan was born in 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York. She was an artist-in-residence at ART/OMI, and Banff Center for Fine Arts, Alberta, Canada. Her tapes have been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and festivals including the 1995 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York.
Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out.

In this documentation of a performance at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donegan uses her body as an art-making tool, and toys with identity politics as well.

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.
To a compilation soundtrack of studio out-takes, including excerpts from the Beach Boys recording sessions for Good Vibrations, we see Donegan work through series of painterly gestures. Her head is shaved; she then paints her head to simulate the lost hair. A model hand holding a paintbrush is made to trace randomly across a sheet of paper, producing a set of faux Abstract Expressionist marks. Naked beneath a clear plastic sheet, the artist paints portraits copied from a monitor. Dipping her head in paint, Donegan draws a line by pushing it across a canvas. Rehearsal explores the limitations of concepts of spontaneous creativity and expression.
In this black and white performance tape, Donegan continues her ironic exploration of the process of making art. Working within the format of a music video, Donegan plays with notions of artist and model, subject and object, and the "painterly gesture."
Donegan eats her way layer by iconic layer through a white bread and KRAFT American Cheese sandwich — crafting hearts, stars, faces and bunnies as she goes. Through a strategic use of close-ups and an aggressive rock n'roll soundtrack, Donegan ironically probes the auto-eroticism inherent in the production and consumption of the "art object" in contemporary America.
Juxtaposing two restagings of a melodramatic scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Channeling analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In Donegan's almost psychedelic renditions, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil, plastic, police tape, and rescanned video images of Tommy star Ann-Margret. In Channeling in 4 Versions, actress Garland Hunter enacts the scene, and then, in a silent version (Channeling in 5 Versions), Donegan herself takes the role.
Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out.
Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out.

Writes Donegan: "... The video is the centerpiece of a large project comprised of paintings and video inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard film Le Mépris. This project does not seek to analyze or critique the Godard film, but to use it as a model, as an inspiration, as a 'classical' language through which other stories can be told... I myself 'play' the roles of both Camille (B. Bardot) and Paul (M. Piccoli). In the Godard film, the characters meet over the recreation of Homer's Odyssey as a Hollywood-style film. In Line, my Homer, the representative of the noble, classical past or Father artist, is the American painter Barnett Newman. In the video, the characters struggle over how to recreate one of his classical 'zips.' This abstract expressionist gesture of presence, of affirmation is for them a mark of cancellation, of destruction. Are they wrong?"

Director Donegan recasts herself as Warhol superstar Viva from his 1967 film "Nude Restaurant".

Refuses began as a visual extension of Carolyn Bergdahl's poem Fuses (after Carolee Schneemann). Just as Bergdhl's poem speaks to Schneemann's taboo-shattering 1964-66 film, Donegan's Refuses is a direct response to the poem. Using Bergdahl's poem as a template, Donegan creates a structured visual language that leans as much on formal rules as it does on content. In Donegan's silent collage of seemingly disparate images culled from Internet searches and home video footage, each new clip directly corresponds to a word in the original Bergdahl poem; the apparent stream of consciousness is governed by a rigorous set of rules.

An obscure, appropriated Yoko Ono monologue is applied to a banal setting.
