Film

Kristie Alshaibi

Initial PGF Award: Undergraduate Film Scholarship, 1998

Kristie participates in many illicit occupations in order to support her filmmaking habit, including teaching video editing in Chicago, running various membership web sites, working as the former program director of the Z Film Festival and creator of the successful 72 Hour Feature Project. Kristie recently partnered with fashion designer Maha Cantello to open MAHAmoda.com, a small on-line couturier business. Her time is now spent making movies and selling original fashions.

She has attempted to elevate her intimate fascination with bodily functions and primal urges to the level of art. In the process, she has received generous grants from such places as the Princess Grace Foundation, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York), as well as a full scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her Master’s degree in Film and Video in 2001.

In 2000, Kristie founded Artvamp, LLC, a multimedia production company in Chicago. In 2004 she travelled to Baghdad, Iraq as Producer for Usama Alshaibi’s documentary film, Nice Bombs. The documentary has received funding from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Playboy Foundation, and was invited to participate in the Tribeca All Access Connects program in spring 2005 where it won the Creative Promise Award. It is slated for a major cable release in 2008. Mrs. Alshaibi has also directed more than twenty short experimental films and videos that have been shown in dozens of festivals across the Americas, Europe, and Australia.

Kristie’s alter ego, prostitute and porn actor Echo Transgression, appeared on MTV’s Sex2K, performed on-air with Mancow’s Morning Madhouse, and has performed as a member of the art ensemble Magic is Küntmaster. Echo is also the central character of Alshaibi’s first feature length digital film titled Other People’s Mirrors.

Aside from her work in film and video, Kristie’s photographs have been published in such varied places as Nerve.com, Gourmet magazine, and the New York Times. Her audio experiments are aired regularly on Chicago Public Radio’s WBEW 89.5 FM. She is also a frequent contributor to $pread Magazine.