Ellen Lake received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2002, where she studied sculpture, film & video, and installation. She is currently working on a body of work incorporating images from cell phone and digital media with clips from 16 mm films from the 1930s and 40s. She is the recipient of Bay Area Video Coalition’s 2005 Mediamaker Award. Work from the new series has been shown at Exit Art in New York, Crawl Space in Seattle, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Antimatter Underground Film Festival in Vicotria, BC, Madcat Film Festival in San Francisco, CyberArts Festival and Axiom Gallery in Boston.

In addition to working on a series combining home movies from the 1930s and 40s with cell phone and digital media from today, I'm still working on a series of short videos examining the thin line between eccentricity and normalcy, documentary and fantasy, hobbyism and obsession. Each video looks at a different collector/collection and when taken together the series reflects the diverse ways people gather, classify, and categorize their collections. If you know of a collector who might be interested, please email me at ellen@ellenlake.com.