BIOGRAPHY

Pamela Robertson-Pearce

Pamela Robertson-Pearce is an artist, filmmaker and translator. Her films include IMAGO Meret Oppenheim (1988/1996), on the artist who made the fur-lined teacup, and Gifted Beauty (2000), about Surrealist women artists including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. IMAGO Meret Oppenheim won several awards, including the Swiss Film Board's Prize for Outstanding Quality and the Gold Apple Award at the National Educational Film and Video Festival in America. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions in New York and Provincetown, and in various group shows in the US and Europe.

Born in Stockholm, she grew up in Sweden, Spain and England, then lived mostly in America - also working in Switzerland and Norway - before moving to Northumberland. She was educated at St Martin's School of Art, London, where she studied film and video for a BFA with Malcolm Le Grice, and later at Emerson College, Boston, USA, where she studied playwrighting and directing for a Master of Theatre Arts (including voice with Kristin Linklater).

She co-edited the anthology Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) with Neil Astley, and worked with him on two DVD-books, In Person: 30 Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and In Person: World Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), filming poets whose work is included in these anthologies. Bloodaxe issued two more of her poetry films on DVDs with books in 2009, John Agard Live! with John Agard's Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems and Life is IMMENSE: visiting Samuel Menashe with Samuel Menashe's New & Selected Poems, followed by Jean 'Binta' Breeze's Third World Girl: Selected Poems with a live performances and interview DVD in 2011. Her full-length feature film Benjamin Zephaniah: To Do Wid Me was released on DVD by Bloodaxe in 2013 in Benjamin Zephaniah's DVD-book To Do Wid Me.

She devised the creative residential courses Sky in the Eye ('Developing Creativity Using Women Surrealists' Art as a Palette') with poet Pascale Petit, hosted by Ty Newydd Writers' Centre, Wales, in July 2013 and July 2016, and Out of the Shell ('Writing and Making Art') with poet and artist Annie Freud, run at Ty Newydd in October 2017. Her Herstory of ART Facebook page showcasing women's work in the arts now has 30,000 followers.

She has also been translating the work of Swedish poets, including Ann Jädelund, Magnus-William Olsson, Katarina Frostenson and Eva-Stina Byggmäster, and is now working with Erik Jonsson on an anthology of modern and contemporary Swedish poetry in English translation.