Cecelia Condit

Cecelia Condit (born 1947) is an American video artist.

Condit's films are noted for their attempts to subvert traditional mythologies of female representation and psychologies of sexuality and violence.

Condit has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Wisconsin Arts Council and National Media Award from the Retirement Research Foundation.

Her work has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France.

Condit was born in Philadelphia in 1947.

She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania.

She received a BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and a MFA in photography from Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

Condit served as professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Beneath the Skin is her first work; this 1981 11:30-minute short film follows a woman's thoughts and musings towards a recent incident in which she discovered that her boyfriend was hiding the body of his ex-girlfriend in his closet.

Skin is based on a real-life incident that occurred in Condit's life when she dated Ira Einhorn, also known as the Unicorn Killer.

Ira had murdered his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and hidden her corpse in his closet.

Condit, who began dating Einhorn, never found Maddux's corpse due to being on medication that hindered her sense of smell.

The film can be found on Condit's personal YouTube channel.

The movie follows the narration an unnamed woman recounting a series of events surrounding her four-year relationship with an unnamed man, and how the corpse of his ex-girlfriend was discovered in his apartment after other tenants began to complain of a pungent smell.

Condit has created a number of video installations including:

Condit has two grown sons, Schuyler Vogel, the chaplain at Carleton College, and Lloyd Vogel, chief executive officer at Garage Grown Gear.

In 2008, Condit had her first solo show exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation in New York.

Her work received renewed attention in 2015 after her short film Possibly in Michigan was posted to Reddit.

Four years later, an audio clip from the same film became a viral hit on TikTok, with over 22,000 iterations created as of July 2019.