Erica Schreiner is a New York–based experimental video and performance artist who has worked with VHS for twenty years. Performing before the camera, Erica creates allegorical, ethereal works that merge femininity, anarchistic themes, ritual and sensuality. Using symbolic materials and immersive sets, she creates surreal, intimate environments with a distinct personal style.

Erica received a BS in Graphic Design from The Art Institute of Portland and was awarded a full scholarship to The School of Visual Arts Lens and Screen Arts Residency Program. She studied performance art under the direction of Marina Abramović at MoMA PS1.

She has completed more than 100 video works, including two feature films and several music videos. Her second feature, The Special People, supported by a New York City Artist Corps Grant, won Best Experimental Feature Film at Dream Machine Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Erica’s films have exhibited internationally in Museums, galleries and film festivals,including The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, Bill Hodges Gallery in New York, Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio, and Performance Space New York. In 2025, Whammy! in Los Angeles and The New York Film-Makers' Cooperative presented a retrospective of her films.

She is a member of the New York Film-makers’ Cooperative (est. 1961) and serves on the curatorial committee at Millennium Film Workshop (est. 1967).

<3

“Erica Schreiner’s videos span a 20-year period, charting her personal and creative evolution within that time frame, while also appearing to collapse time altogether. Her journey as a visual artist, performer and world-maker — beginning in her early 20s through to her early 40s — is crystallized here within the same gauzy, waxy, pastel-tinted medium. Schreiner’s work looks and feels like no one else’s; you always know when you are watching an Erica Schreiner video, and in this sense she is the definition of a true auteur. There are influences and compeers, certainly. As the artist (typically in an enclosed and claustrophobic space) turns the camera on herself, adorns herself with wigs and dresses and glitter, devours fruit and chocolate and butterflies, and smothers her body in paint, one can’t help but think of Věra Chytilová’s candy-coated feminist classic Daisies, Jacques Rivette’s lush and otherworldly Celine and Julie Go Boating (both of which Schreiner cites as key influences) or Chantal Akerman’s gleefully anarchic debut Saute ma ville. Like Schreiner’s work, all of these films probe the tension between creation and destruction and reveal the power and agency to be found in girlishness, whimsy, and so-called frivolity. Schreiner’s videos engage through an intimate and hyper-feminine visual aesthetic, engendering connections to these antecedents while simultaneously transcending precedent altogether to emerge as totally original (and indelible) audiovisual evocations. Ultimately, Schreiner’s work invites viewers into a world that is all her own: one that reveals the softness in anarchy, the tenderness in ruination, and the capacity for creation amid devastation.”

—Matt McKinzie (curator, filmmaker and art director at The New York Film-Makers' Cooperative), 2025