Liz Roberts

Liz Roberts makes artwork that is often collaborative and rooted in moving image and sound. Her work has shown widely, and her 16mm films have screened with Ann Arbor Film Festival, Microscope Gallery, Film-makers’ Cooperative, New York Exposition of Short Film & Video, and Chicago International Film Festival. Roberts is a high school dropout who earned a BA and an MFA. After grad school she held teaching positions in higher education while simultaneously being in an anarchist art collective. She is part of The Infernal Grove, an artist group focusing on those who have a lived history of substance use and various relations to sobriety. Her most recent work, Midwaste, screens at Hot Docs in 2022.

Midwaste 2: Blood Opus

Long before the internet and social media confirmed the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralized and vernacular medium, Liz and Bree were recording VHS video of themselves while making a documentary about transnational adoptees in Iowa. Reaching back through an extensive tape archive, Midwaste 2: Blood Opus (working title) reconstructs the project Bree and Liz were making then, chronicles a pre opioid epidemic Midwest drug scene, and traces the structural and systemic forces running through each of their lives during the decades after.