Jan Oxenberg

Jan Oxenberg is an American lesbian filmmaker, born in Brooklyn in 1950, who was a pioneering figure in queer experimental cinema of the 1970s. Her first film, "Home Movie" (1973), used fast-edited found family footage and a wry voiceover to explore her own coming out, and is regularly cited as an early landmark of what would later be called New Queer Cinema. She followed it with A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts (1975), a witty, subversive series of black-and-white vignettes satirizing lesbian stereotypes — including "The Wallflower," "Seduction," and "The Stompin' Dyke" — at a time when lesbian representation in film was essentially nonexistent. Oxenberg later worked in television and documentary filmmaking, and her early short films are regularly screened in queer film studies courses as foundational texts.