Catherine Pancake


Catherine Pancake is an American filmmaker and musician. She is a co-founder of the Red Room Collective, the High Zero Foundation, the Charm City Kitty Club and the Transmodern Festival. She is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University and director of the Black Oak House Gallery. Her documentary film Black Diamonds, an examination of mountaintop removal mining, has received a number of awards.

Personal

Pancake grew up in the areas of Romney, West Virginia and Summersville, West Virginia. She moved to Baltimore in 1993. she is a relative of the writers Breece D'J Pancake, Ann Pancake, and actor Sam Pancake.

Career

In Baltimore Pancake co-founded the Red Room Collective and High Zero Foundation. She also became a self-trained improvising percussionist and began making films, which ranged from short, experimental meditations to feature-length narratives and documentaries. She is a founding member of the Charm City Kitty Club and the Transmodern Festival
She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she is assistant professor in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University and director of Black Oak House Gallery.
Beginning around 2001, her primary project was a documentary about the mountaintop removal project of the coal in southern West Virginia and its resulting environmental and humanitarian consequences titled Black Diamonds. Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal & The Fight for Coalfield Justice was released by Bull Frog Films for distribution in December, 2006.
Pancake received a master's degree in fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2012. As recipient of the Edes Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, she began the film Genius Project as her Edes Year project. In it she documents five avant-garde artists who identify as queer women: Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Jibz Cameron, Shannon Funchess and Rasheedah Phillips.
Since 2012, Pancake has been directing Queer Genius, a documentary interviewing and following queer-identifying artists Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Shannon Funchess, and Jibz Cameron.

Film and videography