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. A former member of NYPIRG’s 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 knowledge-sharing 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 uses cinema as a perceptual apparatus for meditative realism (as in Two Virgins), alongside its story-telling power. His songs feature voices of children on difficult topics, as in "Song of the Child Brides." His fine art is designed to reveal 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 in several media. He is proud to have worked as 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.