Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, Film, Photography, Installation
Website: finleymuse.com
Jeanne C. Finley (born 1955) is a San Francisco-based media artist who has made the city her home base since the early 1980s. She earned a master’s degree in photography from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also served as curator for the Center for Contemporary Photography. After returning to San Francisco, she worked as Assistant Director of San Francisco Camerawork before joining the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been a Professor of Film and Graduate Fine Art at California College of the Arts and has served on the boards of New Langton Arts, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Djerassi Foundation. She is a longtime member of the San Francisco Threshold Choir, whose songs appear in several of her films.
Finley has received major recognition including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Belgrade, 1989), a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fellowship (Istanbul, 1994), a CEC Artslink Fellowship (Kazakhstan, 2001), a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, the CalArts/Alpert Award, multiple National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Phelan Award. Her films have won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and at festivals in Atlanta, Berlin, Toronto, and the World Wide Video Festival. Since 1989, she has maintained a sustained artistic partnership with educator John Muse, collaborating on films and installations that span four decades.
Finley works in experimental and documentary forms across film, video, photography, installation, and site-specific public works. Her practice is grounded in non-fiction strategies of research — interviews, site visits, and archival excavation — which she weaves into scripted language, found footage, and participatory events. Recurring across her work is a preoccupation with how language shapes and obscures reality: bureaucratic doublespeak, media rhetoric, and institutional power. Her early landmark work Involuntary Conversion (1991) decodes Pentagon terminology — “involuntary conversion = crash,” “soft target = city” — against slow-motion military imagery, creating what she described as an apocalyptic linguistic comedy.
Her later projects expanded into longer, more complex documentary-installation forms built around sustained engagement with communities. Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome (2019), developed with teenagers aging out of an orphanage on the Kazakhstan Steppes, weaves their writings, photographs, and videos into a portrait of imagined futures set against the landscape near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Napoleon Room (2008, reimagined 2022) drew on her mother’s unopened WWII Red Cross archives. Across all her work, Finley moves between the imaginary and the document, making hybrid cinema that is simultaneously lyrical and politically urgent.
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