Sandra Davis came to filmmaking in 1978, influenced by painting and a love of classical and baroque musical forms. Many works center around the body as the site of imagistic and dynamic foundations that structure human impulses, feelings and thoughts. Imagery of natural landscape and architecture reoccur. All the films, as any rhythmic forms, are meant to be understood through the body and senses, as well as the conceptual mind. Editing tactics contrast fluid image and lyrical tempos with jagged, metric rhythms. Contradictory meaning can emerge and traditionally understood meaning can collapse in the parallel streams of images, which pulsate together until one of them takes over. The films utilize a variety of cinematographic techniques including optical printing, which emphasizes the light-infused and textural qualities of the photographic frame. An interest outside the studio has been her research and curating of film programs tracing the evolution of symbolic imagery in the avant-garde film, focusing on contributions by women. She has created mixed-media installations, including a phallic projection object/screen for a Gulf War performance and "Evident/Evidence (Duchamp Back-Talk)" (1992) an exploration of natural and media landscapes and the Congressional Hill-Thomas hearings. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the NEA, and a Phelan award for filmmaking. Her work has been included in major retrospectives of experimental film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York "Millennium - A 25 Year Retrospective" (1991); at the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris "Manifest" (1992); at the University of California Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive “Radical Light – Alternative Film and Video in the Bay Area 1945-2000”. It is represented in national and international collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris.

[Source: Sandra Davis, Artspan]