Zoe is an artist, filmmaker, writer and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York. She aims to make art that both entertains and provokes discussion. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. They include proposals for new forms of community, projects that explore relationships between labor, technology and our inner lives. She created a trilogy of movies, based on ideas for films proposed by never realized by radical artists; Eisenstein’s scenario Glass House, Brecht’s A Model Family in a Model Home and James Agee’s The Tramp’s New World,.
She recently completed a documentary public art project, @ WORK in collaboration with her long-time cinematographer and all-round partner in crime, Eric Muzzy. Many of her works also go out into the world as books. Her most recent publication reproduces her panoramic painting Parade of the Old New , an allegory of America in dark times. She is currently working on a large-scale project, that involves two films Josephine the Singer or the Mouse People , a retelling of the short story by Franz Kafka and Life Forgotten that conjures up the world of New York's Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, centered on a storefront cinema run by the showman Frank Seiden. It asks how does everyday art bring people together?
Zoe’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; include the Whitney Museum Biennale, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center in Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam and FID Marseille. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Graham Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. However, she particularly enjoys working in alternative venues that are free and open to the community for events and conversations. She is a professor at Queens College CUNY.