Peter Cramer

Co-Founder/ Project Director

Peter Cramer is known for cross-disciplinary multimedia works that encompass experimental film, documentary, and diaristic approach. Through photography, film/video, installation and performance, his practice often addresses socio-political engagement and issues of sexual/gender identity, AIDS activism and archival histories.

With his longstanding partner and collaborator Jack Waters he co-established Allied Productions Inc., a non-profit arts umbrella, in 1981. They served as directors of ABC No Rio alternative art collective from 1983 to 1990, and founded Le Petit Versailles, a community garden based in New York City, in 1996.

Peter and Jack‘s current project is “Pestilence”, a multimedia musical opus in three parts that observes virus, contagion, and epidemic as parallel processes to the arcs of human culture and structures of social institutions. Part 1: “Generator” was presented at La MaMa in Spring 2020.

In 2015 they created NYOBS, an alternative experimental free association queer skinned “kitchen“ band born at the Punk Island Festival. Performance highlights include Aprés Avant Garde Festival, Day de Dada, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline: Reading David Wojnarowicz at the Whitney Museum, BWAC, Incarnata Social Club and Mercury Lounge.

Peter’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Danspace Project, Anthology Film Archives, MIX NYC, Center for Contemporary Culture (Barcelona, Spain), Frise Künstlerhaus (Hamburg, Germany) and discussed in publication including Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960-2010, edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski, and Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation by Sarah Schulman. Cramer and Waters are also subjects of Art Spaces Archives Project – oral histories conducted by at the Smithsonian Institution/Archives of American Art. Peter is the unknown #1 interview for the ACT UP Oral History Project (later included as #50).

Residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, Harvestworks, and Yaddo, New York. He is a 2014 Kathy Acker Award recipient.

His films have been preserved with the support of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the National Film Preservation Fund and are available through the Film-makers’ Co-operative, Visual AIDS and Allied Productions’ own archives.

Collaborations with artists include Jack Waters (collaborator), Kembra Pfahler (lighting), Barbara Hammer (performer), Geoff Hendricks (documentarian), the Safdie Brothers (actor), Lorraine O’Grady (director of photography), Stephen Winter (actor), Carl George (actor), Inbred Hybrid Collective (collaborator), Ethan Shoshan (performer) and Matthew Lefiheit (actor).