Dina Seiden was born in the East Village, and barely raised while intermittently lowered in Queens and the Bronx. She attended Swarthmore College and pursued an MFA in Film at Columbia University, where she was granted the Screenwriting and Comedy Central fellowships, and the NY Women in Film and Television Prize.
Dina was radically under-productive to the extent of it being a performance piece itself, but recently, with the aide by turmeric, suicidal ideation inspired by comparing herself unfavorably to more successful friends, magnesium, fish oil, desiccated pig thyroid, bulletproof coffee, Adderall anal suppositories, gogi berries, biofeedback, and an erasure in the streets due to her fading bloom, she’s been fueled to work in a more disciplined fashion, and is feverishly writing both a comedo-tragic collection of short stories, and a longer-form, family-and-friendship-injuring memoir.
She’d be happy to take a stab at writing a funny, edgy, sexy, hip, progressive, middle-aged, feminist column in a magazine, or The Onion-type articles. And while Borowitz had hit his stride, Dina’s as adorably snarky as, Borowitz (no offense Borowitz). Give her a shot if you’re reading this and have the means to plug her in… Not to be self-aggrandizing, but nobody is more balls-out (sexist term notwithstanding) and daring and vulnerable and edgy and funny and smart-ish, she’s the most smart-ish of people. She also has a pilot TV show she sent to a fancy Hollywood agent who contacted her out of the blue to see if she had any stuff in the works (he even sent her the newest copy of Final Draft in which to format it… but then he developed a severe addiction and was in the rehab for months, and she didn’t have the confidence to remind him to read it when he finally had convalesced.
Her short films, “Bitten,” “Jurassic Cock,” “Raw Footage with Cuts,” “The Offspring,” and “Two Ply Becomes Electra” are influenced by the venereal horror genre, and reflect and/or ridicule a preoccupation with infection, transformation, border crossings, and halitosis. She has performed a darkly comedic solo exhibition that is in varying degrees shtick, incantation, psychoanalytic client and/or clinician posturings, absurdist movement puzzles, hyperbolic and euphemistic porn, and drawing-room readings.
Dina’s performed at such venues as Joe’s Pub, PS 1, Dixon Place, The Bell House, Printed Matter, Pianos, Jalopy, Ha! Theatre, Pioneer Works, and Pete’s Candy Store, and twice participated in the Performa Biennial. Her videos have been screened at Zach Feuer Gallery, Miller Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives in NY, Ibid Gallery in London, and UKS Gallery in Oslo. She has collaborated with artists Marianne Vitale, Michael Portnoy, Anthony Haden Guest, JG Thirlwell, Pete Drungle, and Todd Colby, and with artist collectives Kunstverein NY and Bruce High Quality Foundation. As stated, she’s currently writing a fake-ish memoir with the sole aim of perfectly balancing the degrees to which all parties represented will be both emphatically disgusted and secretly flattered. Gibby Haynes from Butthole Surfers recently proposed that she dance on-stage during his short reunion tour, which seems to suggest she’s an awesome dancer…despite the fact that he never followed up to confirm. She’s currently in a pretty groovy experimental-meets-referential rock band called The Fabulous Roman Candles, with Sarah Pez, Daniel Gillian, and Spencer Bewley. Even though she does have a nasal voice and transitions between registers awkwardly, things are working out quite nicely because the other three members are amazing. She lives with her husband, Spencer, who does visuals, mostly on 16mm, for sound amazing bands, and her exuberant, needy cat, Little Lord Fantleroy, aka Homeslice. She writes soul-destroying marketing copy as a freelancer to make ends meet. Luckily, she’s nearly confident that the soul is illusory. She has an amazing p
DINA SEIDEN 