NEW YORK APPARITION THEATER
Halpern collaborated with Ken and Flo Jacobs in this 3D shadow play company in New York City in the early 1970s.
THE L.A. FILM REBELLION
During and after her years as a graduate student in the UCLA film school, Halpern was one of the few white collaborators in this UCLA-centered movement of black film makers, which included Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Sharon Larkin, Jamaa Fanaka and others. She was the gaffer on ILLUSION by Julie Dash and MY BROTHER’S WEDDING by Charles Burnett.
PAT O’NEILL and CHICK STRAND
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Halpern was part of the small but vigorous Los Angeles experimental film community. Together with Pat O’Neill, Chick Strand, David Wilson and others she co-founded the Los Angeles Independent film Oasis, a screening collaborative. She was especially close with Strand and O’Neill. She was an on-camera performer in Strand’s KRISTALNACHT and SOFT FICTION and in O’Neill’s WATER AND POWER, and was the gaffer of O’Neill’s THE DECAY OF FICTION.
AMBIENT LIGHT PRESS
Halpern created her own films as the Ambient Light Institute; as the Ambient Light Press she published a book of her mother Lois Halpern’s poems and drawings for children, RHINOCEROS HEARTS AND SOUR CREAM, and a catalog for her friend Catherina Santasilia’s exhibition TLATILCO UNCOVERED.
JOYCE CAMPBELL
In the late 1990s Halpern shared a Venice California studio with New Zealand artist Joyce Campbell. Halpern collaborated with Campbell on CROWN COACH BOTANICAL, a series of photographs of the flora of a downtown Los Angeles industrial site, the Crown Coach brownfield, using 19th century ambrotype photographic techniques. Campbell appears on camera in Halpern’s ELIXIR.
SINGLE WING TURQUOISE BIRD
Halpern’s husband David Lebrun was a founding member of the 1960s Los Angeles multimedia collective. When the group re-formed in 2010 to do a series of performances, museum installations and campus residencies, Halpern joined the group as a liquid projectionist, working with fellow liquid projectionists Michael Scroggins and Shayne Hood.
NIGHT FIRE FILMS
This film production company was formed in 1996 to produce documentary feature films, multimedia and animation projects. The core Night Fire team is David Lebrun (writer, director, animator), Rosey Guthrie (producer) and Amy Halpern (contributing producer, researcher, cinematographer and lighting director). Halpern was cinematographer, contributing producer and lighting director on the Night Fire feature documentaries BREAKING THE MAYA CODE and OUT OF THE MAYA TOMBS. She was lighting director of the multimedia performance piece MAYA VARIATIONS in multiple cities. Since 2009 She has been contributing producer and lighting director of TRANSFIGURATIONS, an ongoing museum installation project that has involved photography of more than 40,000 artifacts artworks and architectural details at over 300 sites and museums in 16 countries.