Floria Sigismondi
- Director
- Writer
- Actress
Floria Sigismondi is a photographer and director. Apart from her art
exhibitions she is best known for directing music videos. Her trademark
dilating, jittery camerawork, noticeable as early as her video for
Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People", has been replicated by a great
number of directors since. Her parents, Lina and Domenico Sigismondi,
were opera singers. Her family, including her sister Antonella, moved
to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada when she was two. In her childhood she
became obsessed by drawing and painting. Later, from 1987 she studied
painting and illustration at the Ontario College of Art, today's
Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD). When she took a photography
course, she became obsessed once more, and graduated with a photography
major. Floria started a career as a fashion photographer. She came to
directing music videos when she was approached by the production
company The Revolver Film Co., and directed music videos for a number
of Canadian bands. Her very innovative, but also very disturbing video
works, located in sceneries she once described as "entropic underworlds
inhabited by tortured souls and omnipotent beings", attracted a number
of very prominent musicians. With her photography and sculpture
installations she had solo exhibitions in Hamilton and Toronto, New
York, Brescia, Italy, Göteborg, Sweden and London. Her photographs also
were included in numerous group exhibitions, together with those of
photographers like Cindy Sherman and Joel-Peter Witkin. The German art
press Die Gestalten Verlag has published two monographs of her
photography, "Redemption" (1999) and "Immune" (2005).
