Cathy Lee CRANE has been charting a speculative history on film since 1994. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for her lyrical re-combinations of archival and staged material. Her body of work enjoyed its first survey in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. Crane’s award-winning films (which include the experimental biographies Pasolini’s Last Words and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil) have screened at Viennale, San Francisco International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Cinematheque Francais, BFI, and Arsenal/Berlin and are distributed by Canyon Cinema, Lightcone, and Films Media Group. Her first feature-length fictional hybrid The Manhattan Front (2018) premiered at SFIndie Fest in 2018 with a profile in Filmmaker Magazine. 

In 2020 she will release Crossing Columbus, a feature-length documentary about the border town of Columbus, New Mexico which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency and the El Paso Cultural Foundation. Her engagement with the history of the US/Mexico border will continue as 2020 Residency Fellow at the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, where she will prepare an installation of Drawing the Line, a film series presented at the 2019 Poetics and Politics Documentary Research Symposium at UC Santa Cruz.

Crane is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College.