Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer, and award-winning film director. She is perhaps best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; or within her girl gang movie world of strictly female population. Creating a family tree indebted equally to B-movies and diaristic photography, del Mar’s defiantly queer photographs and videos are iconic alternatives to the cultural status quo, offering an exuberant, hyper-stylized sexuality, an unapologetic feminist voice, and often guerilla-style production tactics.

Arcs and archetypes—surfer girls, bike gangs, girls playing in their rooms, bedroom scenes including the artist and others—feature dogs, cars, leather, tattoos. These become fictionalized signifiers of the threat of women’s violence, which the artist, as ringleader, marshals as an active participant. Adding light and color to the powers that urban life has to offer, del Mar “creates a fantasy that moves from violence to sex rather than vice versa” (Chicago Reader)

Jenifer P. Borum has noted of del Mar’s work: “Like Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal, del Mar’s world is both epic and dystopian—a fictional reality that seems very much like our own, only with different rules.”

Del Mar was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts / NYFA Fellowship in Video in 2004 for her film “SURF GANG”, shot in Rockaway Beach, the Hamptons and Montauk. It was screened in an exhibition dedicated to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys at the CAPC (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Bordeaux, France and at the MoMA Dome in Rockaway Beach, NYC. Her experimental films have screened at film festivals the world over, including Frameline, Outfest, Hamburg Schwule Lesbisch Filmfest, Sydney Mardi Gras, MIX NYC, Chicago Underground Film Festival. Katrina’s photographic and multimedia work has been shown at Participant Inc. in NYC, at Art Market Provincetown, and at Leslie Lohman Museum’s Prince Street Project Space. She curates a live series of writers and performance art called Tough Girls and Lucid Dreamers at spaces including The Leslie Lohman Museum, Howl Happening and Participant Inc in NYC and at Art Market Provincetown. She completed her MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, where she presented her Masters Thesis: a feature length documentary titled “An Artist Working as a Letter Carrier.” Katrina founded a punk band three years ago called Tracy City; they’ve released two singles with music videos, to international press raves: “Tracy City is equal parts New York no wave and trashy B-movie. Think: Teenage Jesus and The Jerks or Magazine, if they were fronted by The Fabulous Stains or chicks from Jubilee, and directed by Russ Meyer or Ed Wood.” – Alexandra Weiss“Meet Our Fav New NYC Band: Tracy City” Oyster Mag (Australia)

Throughout her decades-long career as a photographer and filmmaker, Katrina del Mar has been described as “intimidatingly badass” (The Huffington Post), “a speedy person” (Eileen Myles), and a producer of “filth of the highest quality.” (Peter Bagge)

Katrina del Mar paddling out at Rockaway Beach, 2015. still image from delMarvelous, episode 13 “Car Breaks Down”

“Her obsession with Americana iconography — pinups, burlesque, superheroes and leather-jacketed toughs — strikes an immediate dichotomy with her feeling most at home among queer outcasts caked in the urban grime of New York. Typically armed with an 8mm camera, her extreme close-ups and jarringly visceral cutting cast a beautiful, flickering spell. She and her friends — skaters, musicians, and punks — become larger than life figures with an unforgettable allure.” –Spectacle Theatre

“Katrina Del Mar has been active in underground film, photography and erotic fiction for two decades, and her vision is as transcendent as it is transgressive… Beyond the obvious appeal of her vision- women who are devastatingly fierce and utterly feminine- the most captivating aspect of Del Mar’s art resides in its uncanny capacity to collapse fact and fiction.” – Carlo McCormick Photograph Magazine​​​​​​​