Beth Block
Artist
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Biography
Film Achers (1976) Beth Block; 16mm film; color, sound. © Beth Block 2011
Beth Block was born in 1952 in Buffalo, New York, and has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1977. As a filmmaker and artist, she has innovated animation techniques that have given her a prominent place in the film industry�s visual effects field. She attended Kent State for her BA, starting out studying painting, but fell in love with experimental film after being exposed to work by Pat O�Neill and Stan Brakhage in a class taught by Richard Meyers. In 1976 she enrolled in the MFA program at CalArts where she produced FILM ACHERS (1976), a widely-screened optically printed film that has been purchased by the Library of Congress and The Canadian Filmmakers Archives.
After graduating from CalArts in 1977, she moved to Los Angeles where she continued to make experimental films and began a prominent career working in the film industry creating visual effects. Throughout the 1980s, Block produced and directed three films. VITAL INTERESTS (1982), her personal favorite, is a live action experimental film made in response to nuclear proliferation that condensed 10 years of radio newscasts to 15 minutes. During the 1990s, Block began compositing digital visual effects for films big budget Hollywood films.
In 2009, she made her first high definition video, THE BATHTUB SHOT (2009), which she describes as �an hallucinogenic daydream of the artist contemplating the procrastination of her creative process,� and she continues to work with digital media. Her installations and digitally enhanced photographs have been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The Cinematheque, San Francisco, Los Angeles Downtown Federal Building, Los Angeles Filmforum, Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), El Paso, TX.
Block was a founding member of NewTown Pasadena Foundation, an artist-run, non-profit arts organization started in 1996, and from 1985-1995 was a Los Angeles Filmforum board member. She is a member of the Animation Guild and past member of the Cinematographer's Guild and the Writer's Guild of America, West. Her films are distributed by Canyon Cinema.
