Photograph by Amy Toensing
About
James Moyer is a screenwriter, songwriter, and conceptual fine artist. He taught literature, philosophy, and cinema studies at Moore College of Art and Design and The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Formerly a project leader (toxics) for NYPIRG and a member of its state board of directors, he also founded Environmentally Conscious Organized Students (ECOS) for high school students in central New York. He received a PhD in English from Princeton (under Susan Wolfson and Esther Schor), where he also co-founded Scholars in the Schools (SITS) to facilitate exchanges between graduate students and public schools. He has published on film theory (Contemporary Aesthetics) and on William Blake's poetry and art (Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly), and presented on Yasujiro Ozu's films and on philosophical critiques of fine art. He sees cinema as a perceptual apparatus for meditative realism (as in Two Virgins), alongside its narrative power. His songs feature voices of children on far-reaching topics, as in "Song of the Child Brides" and "Picabo Street." His fine art is designed to expose the conceptual role of money in art-world signification—i.e., paradoxically only capital can instantiate the spiritual transformation of commodities in a post-artisanal world. His LLC Salt Springs Productions supports these and other works. He is proud to have been a story consultant on Matt Moyer and Amy Toensing's INHERITANCE, winner of best documentary at Slamdance 2024 in Park City, Utah.. He divides time between Los Angeles and New York.