Lynne Fernie

Lynne Fernie is not a cinematographer, but had fun making images with her iPad while stuck in her apartment during the pandemic for EXC-19. She is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker active in Toronto’s art, feminist and queer cultural communities for 40 years. In the 1980s, she exhibited her visual art in artist-run galleries across Canada, curated the groundbreaking exhibition Sight Specific: Lesbians and Representation, and commissioned a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. She was a founding collective member of Fireweed: A Feminist Journal in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, she was a member of the Women’s Cultural Building Collective and the Beaver Hall Artist’s Co-op housing project; as well as an editor with Parallélogramme, a national bi-lingual artist-run magazine for ten years. She wrote lyrics with The Parachute Club, most notably, the lyrics for the Juno award-winning song, “Rise Up.” In the 1990s, she turned to documentary film, writing and co-directing the award-winning documentaries Forbidden Love: the Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1993), Fiction and Other Truths: A film about Jane Rule (1995), and wrote and directed Apples and Oranges (2003), a short film that combines animation with documentary to teach children about homophobia. She has recently retired as the Senior Canadian programmer for Hot Docs Film Festival; she currently shows work with the Oeno Gallery.