Tessa Hughes-Freeland

Tessa Hughes-Freeland is a British-born experimental filmmaker, writer living in New York City. Her films have screened internationally in North America, Europe and Australia and in prominent museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. She has collaborated on live multi-media projects with musicians like John Zorn and J. G. Thirlwell.

Hughes-Freeland works in a variety of formats and mediums, and her films have been shown in diverse venues, ranging from internationally prominent museums to seedy bars in gritty neighborhoods. Her work frequently confronts conventional perceptions of reality in daring and sometimes provocative ways. Hughes-Freeland's website describes her work as "confrontational, transgressive, provocative and poetic". The critic Jack Sargeant wrote that Hughes-Freeland "approaches filmmaking in a multiplicity of styles, ranging from classic narrative to experimental 'performances' and even a documentary."

Hughes-Freeland was part of the No Wave Cinema movement that began in the mid-1970s on New York City's Lower East Side, which included Scott B and Beth B, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Jim Jarmusch, Tom DiCillo, Steve Buscemi, and Vincent Gallo. In the 1980s, this morphed into the Cinema of Transgression, in which she and other Lower East Side artists and filmmakers created no-budget films and art that contravened prevailing conventions of American society and challenged established, "correct" cultural norms.