Bio
Erica Scoggins’ narrative films and visual art examine moments of unreality brought on by adrenaline, desire, disease, and trauma. Her short, The Sacred Disease (2016), world premiered at the 2016 Vienna International Film Festival, had its U.S. premiere at the 2017 Nashville Film Festival, and screens as part of the Lab Competition at the 40th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in February 2018. The Sacred Disease depicts Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a means to slip through cracks in the fabric of the world. Erica's ongoing paper-based series, Evil Women, presents gaunt and delinquent ladies as they navigate a world that simultaneously desires and demonizes them. This theme fed her most recent film, The Boogeywoman, currently in post-production. The Boogeywoman is a coming of age story about the wonders and horrors of becoming a woman.
After studying fine art and writing at Belmont University in Nashville, Erica completed her MFA in Film Directing at California Institute of the Arts, where she was awarded a Technical Teaching Assistantship and stipend. As a postgraduate teaching fellow at Calarts, she taught a hybrid theory/practice course on ineffable moments and unexplainable phenomena in cinema. She currently teaches Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Though she works in a range of mediums, the moving image and the magic of sound bring forth the most immersive and visceral rendition of the parallel realities that drive her work.
Artist Statement
I am an artist because I am painfully nostalgic for a place that does not exist. I believe in cinema as a tool to recreate fleeting moments of altered reality. I believe in badly behaving women and opening forbidden doors. Cinema should not be a gratuitous occupation of the mind, but rather a reunion with sensations and experiences that remind us we are human and animal.