Mary Jordan (filmmaker)

Mary Jordan (born August 14, 1969) is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, activist and social justice advocate based in New York City. She grew up in the Bronx and in Toronto, Canada. She studied literature, cultural and social anthropology and art. She has lived in Australia, India, Thailand and Burma and traveled in more than 50 countries. At the age of 18, after a trip through North Africa, she made her first documentary film, a work about female circumcision. Jordan was especially interested in rites of passage and in matriarchal and polygamous societies, like in Papua New Guinea. At the age of 20 she was the producer of Canadian directors like Steve Chase and Marco Brambilla. In Sydney, Australia she founded the production firm Indigo Blue for music videos and commercials.

Since 2005 she is mainly living and working in New York. In 2005 she had already been acclaimed by the magazine filmmaker as one of the 25 "new faces of independent film-making". The same year, in the Old Chelsea Y.M.C.A. in New York she held an exhibition about Jack Smith, including films, photographs and radio-broadcasts of his as well as interviews with his friends. In New York she set up a performance art troupe called Parthenogenesis who performed in venues from CBGB's, the Box, Canal Room and to many underground theatres and lofts. She directed 42 different performances with the troupe.

Mary Jordan is the Founder and Creative Director of Word Above the Street, a not-for-profit established in 2010. Leveraging the transformational power of art and technology, Word Above the Street pioneers fresh methods of communication to produce visionary art exhibitions that capture the imagination, stir the conscience, and have the power to change the world. While working on an ethnographic film about the Hammer people in Ethiopia, Jordan became acutely aware of the extreme challenges that the population faced in accessing clean water. Galvanized by this experience, Jordan was determined to create an awareness campaign around the issue of water scarcity. The Water Tank Project is Mary Jordan’s current venture and Word Above the Street's inaugural project. In the summer of 2014, carefully selected rooftop tanks across New York City will be temporarily wrapped with original artwork on the subject of water. This production will redefine the skyline across all five boroughs and affect millions of people around the world. Jordan spoke at the Festival of Ideas for the New City in 2011, where she presented The Water Tank Project, and at PolicyLink Equity Summit 2011 in Detroit, where she was a guest speaker. She is also developing a curriculum for the Earth Institute at Columbia University on art and advocacy.

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