Femme Vitale is Telepathine Studio’s inaugural project as a production company. The six-episode documentary series introduces cis and trans women who are working in the fields of art, music, environmentalism, and social advocacy to bring about important conversations on gender and racial violence, climate change, immigration and identity, queerness, and male-dominated industries.
Season 1. highlights the work of:
Kirstyn Hom an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, performance, and installation, responds to her grandmother’s labor as a seamstress in 1940s Chinatown in San Francisco. She explores the ways in which her grandmother’s handmade garments required endurance but left no trace of her identity. In contrast, Hom is interested in transforming a machine-made object into a reflection of her human touch. Through this exploration, she translates the language barrier that existed between them and the unique combination of gestures and acts of care they developed as communication.
Nicole Merton, photographer, and activist of Mescalero Apache descent presents portraits from her series Here… Our Voices, Our MMIW Movement, which focuses on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement. During her journeys throughout the United States, Nicole meets with Native American women and families who have lost their loved ones to gender and racial violence and performs a healing ritual in which she imprints a red hand that symbolizes solidarity with the unique issues that affect her communities.
Dillon Chapman, is a Southern California-based artist, educator, and cultural theorist who investigates notions of the self as subject/object. Drawing from personal and cultural archives, her practice contemplates intimacy, desire, and relations of power through writing, performance, and image-making. As a queer trans woman, Chapman is interested in exploring cinematic tropes associated with cis and trans women, as well as highlighting the importance of self-determination and the history and importance of photography and film in the construction of queer culture.
Ana Andrade is a trans-border artist who lives and works between Tijuana and San Diego. Andrade’s work explores topics of transit, migration, and liminality, which center on the creation of alternative spaces that erase human-made ideas of the border and reveals a natural world that is magical, alive, and constant. In addition to addressing physical and political borders, Ana seeks to propose diverse relations between visible and invisible place, human and non human, geological and biological spheres.
Sabrosas Latin Orquesta is an all-female salsa band bringing joy, diversity, and community-building space to the San Diego region. Made up of 12 talented musicians coming from different backgrounds and traditions, SLO thrives in a male-dominated genre and brings forward representation and passion for salsa music while sharing and elevating Latin culture in the city. SLO is a band, a tight-knit community, and evidence of female leadership & talent.
Monica Nelson is a PhD student in Physical Oceanography at UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography and an advocate for climate justice. Her research attempts to address the question: How is the ocean’s capacity to store and redistribute heat changing as anthropogenic climate change warms the planet? In addition to her academic interest in the science of climate change, she is also deeply concerned by the lack of large-scale political and economic action being taken to prevent its worst impacts. Nelson channels that concern into community climate justice initiatives: she is a leading member of the grassroots organization Green New Deal at UCSD and the state-wide UC Green New Deal Coalition – demanding that the UC take more action to reduce their climate impacts. Nelson is originally from New Zealand where, prior to moving to San Diego, she founded a local branch of 350 Aotearoa, a nationwide climate justice organization.