About

Kerstin Schaars (American b. 1978) is an artist and filmmaker. Heavily influenced by the camera trickery of early movie-masters such as Alice Guy and Buster Keaton, Kerstin uses cinema as a means to address the ambiguous tension between delight and melancholy, or magic and reality. 

She travels extensively to shoot very ordinary things. She has collaborated with metal-smiths, weavers, clothing designers, honey vendors, musicians and visual artists to create site-specific installations. She builds her own movie sets and often employs her children as actors, cinematographers and sketch artists.Kerstin has a PhD in comparative literature which means she trained to be a professional
reader. She has been working since she was thirteen. She founded and shuttered a publishing imprint named after her two grandmothers, Harriet and Leone. She worked in a Paris-based gallery with a German client-base and she speaks no German. She worked less than a week in a Paris hotel, exiting in part because the American guests were enormously disappointed when greeted in American-English. She worked as a literature lecturer. She worked for the legal team at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Along the way, she learned to cook and to eat. From the cook in the Paris hotel who put rabbit in a mustard cream sauce on the menu just so she could learn how to make it, to the chef in Jackson, Mississippi who, when asked how he made the beans so sweet, said sugar (slowly), Kerstin found apprenticeship wherever she went. She learned how to cook a standing rib roast in the galley of a T.W.A. airliner flying over the Atlantic from her mother who did just that. From her neighbor’s great-aunt visiting from Pakistan she learned which blend of spices could sweeten the breath. She learned how to stretch meals with starch from grandmothers, one of whom was her own. She learned how to bring people together over food and help them forget and discover new versions of themselves.