Rosemary Comella

Rosemary Comella is a new media artist with a background in the visual arts, in particular photography, video and graphic design. Since 2000 she has been working as a researcher, project director, interface designer and programmer at the Labyrinth Project. At Labyrinth, she developed the main interface for Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill, a collaborative project between experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill, Kristy H.A. Kang and the Labyrinth team, and she helped direct The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Current of the River, an interactive installation with filmmaker Peter Forgács. Additionally, she developed Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986, an interactive installation and DVD-ROM, in collaboration with media artist Andreas Kratky, cultural historian Norman Klein and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany. She directed and served as photographer for Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment, an installation and DVD-ROM, including catalog, exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2005. Comella is currently creative director for Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage, a public on-line archive and museum installation that aims to illuminate one hundred and fifty years of Jewish history in California. Through a visually engaging interface users are invited to practice their own historiography by inserting their own histories and memories—using text, home movies, photographs and ephemera—into the contents of the website. This user content becomes interwoven with previously published histories and newly uploaded scholar contributions. Additionally, an immersive museum installation will feature various select home movies, photographs and stories collected from the website to be re-orchestrated for particular themes for a multi-screen, cinematic presentation.