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Remembering Nancy E. Andrews: She Had Some Work Done to Stream on Whush
Artist and experimental filmmaker Nancy E. Andrews, whose singular body of work moved freely between cinema, drawing, performance, music and publication, passed away on July 11. In tribute to her life and work, her latest short film, She Had Some Work Done, will be streamed on Whush as part of the Auteur Cinema Archive.
Nancy E. Andrews spent her career working at the fertile edges between disciplines. A filmmaker, artist, performer and musician, she created hybrid works encompassing films, drawings, objects, installations, performances, music and publications. Across these forms, Andrews developed a distinctive artistic language—one that could be playful, unsettling and deeply perceptive about the social structures through which we understand ourselves.
Her latest short film, She Had Some Work Done, turns its attention to beauty and the pressures surrounding it. Examining what it means to conform to accepted norms of physical appearance, the film considers the ways ideals of beauty are constructed, imposed and internalised. Characteristically, Andrews approaches the subject through an experimental cinematic sensibility rather than a conventional narrative framework, opening a space to question what is considered desirable, acceptable or “normal.”
The film was selected for Venice Film Week, and it was through that selection that we came into contact with Dru Colbert. Following Nancy E. Andrews’ passing, Colbert agreed to the presentation of Andrews’ latest short film, She Had Some Work Done, on Whush, the festival’s streaming platform. The film will now be made available in the Auteur Cinema Archive, giving audiences an opportunity to encounter one of Andrews’ final works and to celebrate the singular artistic voice she leaves behind.
Andrews leaves behind an important and highly individual body of work. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has collected six of her experimental films, while her work is also held in the collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Franklin Furnace Archives.
In 2008, Andrews was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in filmmaking, recognition of a practice that consistently expanded the possibilities of the moving image.
Her films were presented by some of the most significant institutions and festivals devoted to experimental and independent cinema. They screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives and the Flaherty Seminars, as well as at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Film on the Rocks in Thailand and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among many others.
Throughout her career, Andrews resisted easy categorisation. Film existed as part of a much broader artistic practice in which media could overlap, collide and transform one another. Humour, observation, performance and experimentation became ways of looking critically at contemporary life and at the systems that quietly shape how we perceive ourselves and others.
That makes She Had Some Work Done an especially fitting work through which to remember her. Its examination of beauty, conformity and the expectations placed upon appearance reflects the larger curiosity running throughout Andrews’ practice: an impulse to look closely at familiar cultural assumptions and make them strange enough to be questioned again.
With its presentation at Venice Film Week and its subsequent place in the Whush Auteur Cinema Archive, the film now also carries a poignant final chapter in Andrews’ relationship with audiences. Through the efforts of Dru Colbert to ensure that Nancy’s work remains visible and accessible, She Had Some Work Done can continue its journey beyond the festival screen.
It is both a final film and an invitation to look back at a remarkable body of work—one created by an artist who spent decades challenging conventions, whether those conventions belonged to cinema, art, the body or the way society teaches us to see.
Nancy E. Andrews’ She Had Some Work Done, selected for Venice Film Week, will stream on Whush in the Auteur Cinema Archive.
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