Andrea Eis Creating A Visual Voice To Silent Conversations

Artist and teacher... Andrea Eis is a Professor and Director of Cinema Studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her art is a creative blend of her academic influences (classics, anthropology and photography/film/video), bringing together film, photography and even fabric.

Her recent exhibit, Marginalia,will be exhibited online with Politismos this winter. We had an opportunity to speak with the artist and learn how she is giving “visual voice” to the beauty of the words that captivate her…

Q. . In addition to your work asan artist and professor of cinema studies, you also have degrees in classics and anthropology. What was it that drew you to classics?

I had been fascinated with learning about the past since grade school, even going to years of “Young Archaeologist Lectures” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. When I started my undergraduate studies at Beloit College, I knew nothing about classics as an academic field. In a chance encounter during registration for my first semester, a classics student handed me a flyer on learning ancient Greek, and I decided to give it a try. From there, it was my excellent professors who really drew me in – they were passionate about the value and resonance of Greek language, literature, and culture, and passed that along to their students. They taught me about the intellectual depth and poetic expressiveness in Greek thought and language. I discovered a love of translation – in its own way an archeological dig into the past – with its puzzle of interpretation, how it created a dialog with people who had lived thousands of years ago. With my art, I hope to continue that dialog, in another form of translating the past.

Q. Your recent exhibit “AndreaEis: Marginalia” was on exhibit at the Sweet Briar’s Babcock Gallery and will be featured on Politismos. It features your photographs as well as the handwritings of Meta Glass you’d found in some textbooks. How did the concept for the actual exhibit come about?