Lee Anne Schmitt is a Los Angeles based filmmaker interested in political thought, personal experience and the land. Much of her work revolves around landscape, objects, and the traces of political systems left upon them. Her projects have addressed American Exceptionalism, the logic of utility and labor, gestures of kindness and refusal, racial violence, cowboyism and the efficacy of solitude.
She has exhibited widely at venues that include MoMA NY, the Getty Museum, RedCat Theater, Northwest Film Society, Centre Pompidou, festivals such as Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, BAFICI, and FID Marseilles.
There have been retrospectives of her work at the Viennale (Austria), Northwest Film Center (USA), Pesaro Film Festival (Italy) and Frontiera Film Festival (Brazil), as well on Portugese Television. She is the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation and Creative Capital, and was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.
She is currently working on a series of films using personal objects to explore how trauma affects narrative structures; she hopes to complete the editing of her most recent film Evidence while at MacDowell.
At MacDowell in 2018, Schmitt worked on a series of films entitled Evidence, examining histories of privilege, violence and the constructions of gender through the use of family objects and anecdotes. She completed a rough cut of the film. In addition, she began several new projects, researching the role of white women in the continuation of the American political structures and patriarchies and shot footage for additional work focused on the body and the defiance of age.
