Distinguished Service Award to Joan E. Biren
Presented by former GLAA President Barrett L. Brick
GLAA 39th Anniversary ReceptionWashington Plaza Hotel
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
JEB – Joan E. Biren – is an internationally recognized documentary artist. Her photographic and film work has chronicled the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people for more than three decades, bringing us a new and vibrant visibility.
JEB was born and grew up here in Washington DC, and developed an innate strength and integrity at an early age. As she explains to the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project:
all my friends were telling me I was going to go to hell because I was Jewish. You know, they were very Christian and they would say, “Oh, you’re Jewish, you’re going to go to hell,” and try to get me to go to church with them and change me. And it was just something in my — my innate stubbornness and something about, OK, this doesn’t feel bad, why is every — I was just — very similar to how I felt about my lesbianism later. You know, everybody is telling you it’s wrong, it’s bad, but it’s who you are and I was very fortunate to have something in myself that said you should be true to who you are, and I think that came out first around my Judaism.
JEB graduated from Mount Holyoke College – the first of the Seven Sisters -- in 1966, and pursued graduate training at Oxford University and the American University. JEB became a member of the Washington DC Women's Liberation group in 1969. One of the first out lesbians in the movement, JEB and others (including Rita Mae Brown and Charlotte Bunch) formed a lesbian-separatist collective, the Furies, in 1971 and published The Furies newspaper. Though the collective was short-lived, it had, through its publications, a significant impact on the strategies of the women's movement.
JEB is best known for her photographic portraits, some of the earliest documents of late 20th-century lesbian life. Acknowledging the need for affirming images and self-expression beyond traditional patriarchal language, her work has appeared in off our backs, The Washington Blade, Gay Community News, and on countless album and book covers. In 1997 George Washington University organized a retrospective exhibition of her photographic work, QUEERLY VISIBLE: 1971-1991, which toured the nation. Many images from that exhibit are now are on permanent display in the offices of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Her work has also been exhibited at the Lincoln Center, the New York Public Library, and the Leslie/Lohman Gallery in New York.
She has also published two ground-breaking collections of her photography: Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians and Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front. As JEB has explained:
I wanted to be a photographer in large part because I needed to see images of lesbians, and it was... a visceral thing. I wanted a reflection of my reality, and I think everybody wants that. My experience is that there's an enormous hunger among people to be able to see themselves. It's always an enormous emotional high the first time you see something that is you in that medium. And that is because there's this huge hunger for the kind of validation that comes from seeing a reflection. And part of why I've devoted my life to what I call 'making the invisible visible' is for that reason.
JEB is the President of Moonforce Media, a non-profit film and video organization that has been serving progressive communities since 1979. Moonforce Media organized the first feminist film festivals in Washington, DC and arranged a national women’s film circuit that brought the work of lesbian and feminist filmmakers to audiences in more than 40 cities around the country. In the 1990s, JEB and Moonforce moved into production and made films that have been seen on public broadcasting stations and the Sundance Channel. Her films have won numerous awards including Best Documentary citations from the American Library Association, the Provincetown International Film Festival and twice from Reel Affirmations. Moonforce productions include No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, used in classrooms and featured in film festivals around the world. JEB documented the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay rights in For Love and For Life. As the video producer for the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, JEB was responsible for the giant screens on the Mall, a satellite feed to viewers around the world and A Simple Matter of Justice, the official March on Washington video, in which I am honored to have been included. With the Mautner Project, JEB made Removing the Barriers, the first lesbian video funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is used to train healthcare providers. After Hurricane Katrina, JEB coordinated a group of volunteer filmmakers in New Orleans to produce Solidarity, Not Charity, a DVD on relief efforts.
JEB has been a featured speaker at the NGLTF Creating Change Conference, the National Women’s Studies Association, the National Women’s Music Festival and the National Lesbian Physicians' Conference. She has spoken to academic audiences ranging from Radclyffe College to the Universities of Alabama, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. JEB has appeared with her videos at festivals from Albany NY to Olympia WA. She speaks on various topics including lesbian and gay history; lesbian culture and mainstream representation; and the media and social change. She truly makes the invisible visible. I am proud to call her my friend, and it gives me great pleasure to present JEB with GLAA’s Distinguished Service Award.
