Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

Eleonora Derenkovskaya, who took the name Maya Deren, was born in Kiev in 1917 into a Jewish family that left the country in 1922 because of the pogroms. She studied journalism and then literature, was active in the socialist left and became the assistant of an African American choreographer. In 1942 she married the Czech cameraman Alexander Hackenschmied, known as Hammid, a refugee in the United States. She completed six films from 1943 to 1959, obtained in 1946 the first Guggenheim fellowship awarded to creative cinema and from 1947 filmed voodoo rites in Haiti. She died in New York in 1961.

In the catalogue 1

• CinemaMeshes of the AfternoonMaya Deren and Alexander Hammid · 1943Cinema