Falling Up the Stairs with Janet Sternburg [] Teatro Santa Ana en la Biblioteca

Purchase Tickets Online

Photographer Janet Sternburg will present a journey of “falling up the stairs,” her phrase for beginning a  new art in midlife here in San Miguel where she visited for decades and now makes her home. Self-taught  as a photographer, she describes falling up the stairs as a fall to freedom – from other people’s practices to  her own vision of using low tech cameras without manipulation to capture the multiple layers of  experience within a moment. One of Sternburg most- loved quotes is from poet Antonio Machado, “There  is no path. You make the path as you walk.” For her Biblioteca presentation, she will show images of her  work as well as talk about the creative process with her composer and friend Ken Bichel. There will be a q & a.

About Janet Sternburg
Most photographers don’t have eyes in the back of their heads .Janet Sternburg does. -Wim Wenders  “Janet Sternburg has been walking and what she saw will amaze you.” – Review, Forbes, October 27 th  2021. These lines could encompass the entirety of Sternburg’s life as a fine art photographer, a writer, a  maker of theatre and films, an educator, a thinker.

She grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and moved to New York city as soon as that became a possibility.  She lived in New York for 25 years, graduating from The New School University with a degree in  philosophy, and going on to a rich professional life that included associate producer for public television  where she wrote and directed several films, among them El Teatro Campesino, shown at the New York  Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole, winner of a Cine Golden Eagle  and broadcast nationally.

Among her other New York positions were Director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre  Club where she created new ways to present literature on stage, and Senior Program Officer at The New  York Council for the Humanities. Her media work continued as Senior Media Officer for The Rockefeller  Foundation, opening its Intercultural film and video program to Latin America.  During that time, she  began her life in photography when she first went to Mexico and found her own way of seeing. In those  years, she had many solo international exhibitions and commissions, among them in Berlin, New York,

Seoul Korea, Milan Italy as well as publishing portfolios of her work in Aperture, Art Journal, followed by several monographs. After several decades of coming to Mexico on short trips, she now lives there full-time.