Olivia has always been fascinated by the power of film, having attended LaGuardia Arts High School for drama. At Hunter College, Olivia minored in Film, where she was exposed to filmmakers who would have a major impact on her filmic aesthetic: namely Maya Deren, Agnès Varda, and Wong-Kar Wai. Olivia began experimenting with creating dance films in 2017, usually filming on an iPhone or Canon DSLR and editing with PremierePro. She is inspired by nature, architecture, and the rhythmic nature of editing.

Within We Rise

Within We Rise is a collaborative, improvisational piece for Poético Dance Collective. It was created in December 2020 in collaboration with the Dressember Foundation, for their annual December fundraiser.

Lost in Space

During quarantine in spring/summer 2019, the members of Philadelphia-based Poético Dance Collective collaborated on this virtual movement project. Using Emmit Fenn’s song Lost in Space, each member of the collective sent in videos of them improvising to the same music. I collected all the footage and edited it together into this dance film, which premiered at Poético’s “Work in Progress” virtual showcase in July 2020.

COLORADO

The process of my first dance film, COLORADO, began in July, 2019, while atop Grouse Mountain in Eagle-Vail, Colorado, approximately 10,000 feet above sea level. The sense of movement within the mountainous, expansive landscape inspired my dance improvisations, which were all site-specific. The relationship between landscape and movement foregrounds the formal aspects of the film as well. COLORADO is an exploratory journey into the deep connection between presence and place that I experienced atop the mountain.

FAIRMOUNT 2019

In Summer 2019, I came across “The Wedges” (1970) by Robert Morris in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. Inspired by how the sculpture interacts with its surrounding environment, I used it as the basis for a durational, site-specific improvisational dance film. I filmed myself dancing within the sculpture in early October, late November, and early March 2020. Little did I know that shortly after filming for the last time in the sculpture, a pandemic would sweep the globe, forever altering our relationship with public art and public space. I edited this film during quarantine, from March to June 2020. It is an exploration into how a place, in this case The Wedges in Fairmount Park, is impacted by the ceaseless charge of time, as well as how the act of returning to a space can seem to deconstruct the illusion of time itself.