Bio
Erica Scoggins is a Chattanooga-based artist and filmmaker nurtured by the beauty and ghosts of southern soil. Her multi-disciplinary practice examines altered states of consciousness brought on by adrenaline, desire, disease, and trauma and draws on myth and archetype to challenge modern social standards.
After studying fine art and writing at Belmont University in Nashville, Scoggins completed her MFA in Film Directing at California Institute of the Arts. As a postgraduate teaching fellow at Calarts, she taught a hybrid theory/practice course on the depiction of unexplainable phenomena in cinema. Her films have screened internationally in Austria, France, Greece, Kenya, the UK, Amsterdam, Spain, Egypt, and Peru as well as across the United States. Scoggins is currently developing a feature film drawing on the themes and relationships in her latest short, The Boogeywoman.
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.