American filmmaker and activist Barbara Hammer was BOTD in 1939. Born in Los Angeles, California, she studied psychology at University of California Los Angeles. In 1961, she married Clayton Ward on the condition that he would take her around the world; they spent the following year riding from Italy to Hong Kong on a motorbike. On her return to California, she enrolled in a painting course, and was encouraged to pursue filmmaking. She studied film at San Francisco State University, becoming involved in the emerging women’s rights movement. In 1974, she came out as a lesbian, left her marriage and took off on a motorcycle tour with a Super-8 camera. Later that year, she made Dykenetics, thought to be the first lesbian-themed American film. She made 29 films in the 1970s, notably Superdyke, an exploration of sexual intimacy between women, and Double Strength, a portrait of her relationship with trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff. In the 1980s, she relocated to New York City, becoming involved in LGBT activism and protesting the Reagan administration’s failure to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. She is best known for her 1992 film Nitrate Kisses, a portrait of LGBT marginalisation in the 20th century. Screened at the Berlinale and the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, it was condemned by American conservatives, who objected to Hammer receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant to make the film. Other notable works include the experimental memoir Tender Fictions; History Lessons, an attempt to recover hidden lesbian history via pulp fiction and pornography; Diving Women of Jeju-do, a portrait of Korean shellfish divers; and A Horse Is Not a Metaphor, chronicling her battle with ovarian cancer. In later life, she was recognised as a pioneer of avant-garde and lesbian filmmaking, receiving numerous industry honours, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2010, she published a memoir Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life. Her final film, Evidentiary Bodies, chronicled her involvement with the right-to-die movement. Hammer was in a relationship with human rights activist Florrie Burke from 1986 until her death in 2019 aged 79.

She was in a relationship with Hammer’s partner of 31 years, Florrie Burke,

published an autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life,

This generous spirit led Hammer to sponsor two awards for young filmmakers: The Queer Filmmaking Award, given yearly to a student by the Queer Institute at San Francisco State University, and the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, given by Queer|Art in New York.

Hammer’s output slowed in the 2000s as she focused on a series of longer films, several of which, including My Babushka (2001) and Resisting Paradise (2003), touched on themes of civil liberties and resistance. When Hammer was undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer, she chronicled her own “resistance” in A Horse Is Not a Metaphor (2008), as she “found beauty in the light rays coming through the window and the chemo bag” and in riding horseback in New Mexico and Wyoming once chemo was over. “Surviving wasn’t the word for how I felt,” Hammer wrote. “I was thriving!” 

Hammer’s 2017 gallery exhibition, “Truant” at Company Gallery featured intimate photographs from the 1970s and production stills from her film shoots. Writing for the online arts journal Hyperallergic, Susan Silas noted that Hammer “gives us women who are comfortable in their own skins; who have their own agency and who, like Hammer herself, have refused to be managed.”

The final gallery exhibition during her lifetime was held in September 2018 at KOW-Madrid. “Contribution to Light” featured Hammer’s earliest film work, most of which had never been seen in public. Hammer’s work is held in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Her complete catalogue of 16 and 8mm film, as well as Super 8, is in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles, and her papers are available for review at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. 

In addition to Ms. Burke, Hammer is survived by her sister, Marcia Ebert, her nephew Demian Ebert and his wife, Sheila Ryan, nephew Justin Ebert and his wife, Michelle, and their children, Anthony, Dominic, and Sophia Ebert.