S u m a c h a u t h o r s
Gail Vanstone
Gail Vanstone is an assistant professor in the School of Arts and Letters in the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies at York University. She is a faculty member of the School's Culture and Expression program and holds a doctorate in social and political thought. An accomplished academic, writer and cultural critic, Vanstone specializes in Canadian cultural production with a particular interest in feminist film, performance and literature. As a former professor in the School of Women Studies, she taught a course in film and feminism and organized a film series for students.
Vanstone's fascination with film, the stories of women's lives and feminism as a personal and political impulse inspired her recent publication D is for Daring: The Women behind the Films of Studio D (Sumach Press, 2007). A work of feminist cultural history, D is for Daring chronicles the events and personalities shaping Canada's one and only state-funded feminist filmmaking studio that was part of the National Film Board from 1974 to 1996. A significant component of the women's movement of the 1970's, Studio D made a profound contribution to feminism in English-speaking Canada, a contribution that has attracted both praise and condemnation.
Vanstone has been engaged in the arts more generally as a dance writer, performer and collaborator and as editor of Canadian Dance News. More recently, she was a board member for the Ford Centre for the Arts (now the Toronto Centre for the Arts); she is a past chair of the North York Art Gallery (MOCCA) and of the Gallery's acquisitions committee. She has participated in a number of international conferences on the arts and curated an exposition of Canadian films in Moscow in 1997. Two years ago, Vanstone created Remembering Miriam, a four-minute digitized documentary short paying homage to the Canadian poet and intellectual Miriam Waddington.
D is for Daring
Categories
· Cultural Studies
· Film Studies
· Womens' Issues
Points of Interest
· Canadian feminist
filmmakers and their works
· First book about Studio D
B&W photographs
280 pages
$28.95 Cdn
$28.95 US
6" x 9" paper
ISBN-10: 1-894549-67-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-894549-67-7
other recent WIPP publications
· Trans/forming Feminisms
· Remembering Women
Murdered by Men