Nina Menkes


Nina Menkes is an independent filmmaker. Her films include The Great Sadness of Zohara, Magdalena Viraga, Queen of Diamonds, The Bloody Child, Phantom Love and Dissolution, which was filmed in black and white and is set in Israel. Her sister Tinka appears as an actress in many of them. Menkes teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California. She has donated copies of several of her works to the Academy Film Archive.

Life

Menkes was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1977 she took a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1987 completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. From 1985 to 1989 she taught in the film department of California State University, Northridge, and then, from 1990, at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita; she became an adjunct professor in film at the University of Southern California in the same year.

Work

Films by Menkes include:
In 2018 Menkes presented an illustrated talk on "Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Oppression" in several venues, among them the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Reception

Menkes became a fellow of the American Film Institute in 1991. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, and in 1993 was an artist-in-residence in Berlin under the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
She has been nominated for a number of awards, and has won:
Two of Menkes' films—Magdalena Viraga and Queen of Diamonds—have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in 2012 and 2019, respectively.