Isabel Barton

ISABEL BARTON / BIO

Isabel Barton is a Venezuelan born, New York resident filmmaker, photographer and writer. Having been awarded the National Award for Photography in her native Venezuela in 1972, she went on to study photography under the mentorship of William Garnett at UC Berkeley in 1974 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 1976.  Under mentorship of master photographer Ezra Stoller, her architectural photographs, along with her writing, were published in major magazines worldwide and her portraits of artists, including Philip Glass, Keith Haring and Jesús Soto, in catalogues, posters and magazines internationally. During those years, 79-01, her photographs and silkscreens showed in galleries and museums throughout the US, including the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, NJ, the Center for Inter American Relations, NYC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA.  

Stark Angels, her first documentary short, was produced in 1999 and premiered at the Tjaden Gallery at Cornell University. In 2000 she produced and directed a pilot for a TV mini-series, Unraveling Hudson, which screened widely in the Hudson Valley.  She then produced, directed, photographed and edited three experimental shorts, Christina’s World, which premiered at the FilmColumbia Festival, 2001; Red Dot, exhibited at the Hudson ArtsWalk in 2001; and Julie of the Spirits, in collaboration with composer Peter Wetzler, which premiered at the 2002 Woodstock Film Festival and went on to screen at FilmColumbia (2002), Gallery, NYC, Deep Listening Space, Kingston (2002), at the Nohra Haime Gallery in Manhattan (2003), and at the Meade Museum at Amherst College, MA (2003). 

Barton has written four feature screenplays: Aida, I Am Carreño, and Jimmie Angel are original screenplays; The Queen Of Spades is a literary adaptation of the Alexander Pushkin short story.

She also co-wrote The Aspern Papers, a modern day adaptation of the Henry James novella, with long-time collaborator Mariana Hellmund.  Hellmund and Barton, in collaboration with Andrea Roa, produced the feature film which shot on location in an old cocoa plantation in Venezuela in May 2009, with Hellmund at the helm.  Aspern is in its last stages of post-production.

Barton is currently working in an feature-length experimental documentary titled Women of the Falls, about Pemón Indian Hortensia Berti.  Hortensia’s tribe, the Kamarakotos, a sub-tribe of the Pemón, live at the foot of the mountain that houses Angel Falls. Women of the Falls has been awarded two grants from New State Council on the Arts, a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation and an SOS grant from New York Foundation for the Arts. The project is currently under the sponsorship program of the New York Foundation for the Arts.  It is presently in post-production. 

Barton is funding member of the Jimmie Angel Historical Project, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the research and dissemination of information about Jimmie Angel, the American pilot who discovered Angel Falls in 1933.  The organization is presided by Karen Angel, the pilot’s niece.?She is also an active founding board member of Angel Conservation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of indigenous cultures and their habitat.  Angel Conservation is currently implementing Project Kamarakoto, a program that intends to restore the cultural identity of the Kamarakoto tribe and find solutions for the sustainability of their lives and land, as they become a more solid community recognized and respected worldwide.