ABOUT THE FILM

Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images

Format: Broadcast-quality digital video

Length: Approximately one hour

Producers: Amy Kellum, Executive Producer in association with The Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, Jeanette Stokes, Executive Director, and Minnow Media, LLC, Donna Campbell and Georgann Eubanks, Producers

Release date: June 28, 2009

Meinrad Craighead: Praying with Images, an hour-long documentary, offers an introduction to the lifelong pilgrimage of Meinrad Craighead and her mystical encounters with the Divine Feminine. As she explains the dreams and shamanic journeys that have often been the inspiration for her art, viewers are introduced to images of the Divine Mother that have appeared around the globe throughout human history. Craighead discusses the Black Madonna and her lifelong fascination with animals as the sacred emissaries of divine messages.

Audiences: The documentary is targeted to a general audience and is appropriate for public television, seminaries and religion departments, women’s studies programs, art historians, and Jungian scholars and their students.

Format: Meinrad Craighead is an inveterate storyteller whose tales refer to incidents in her childhood all the way up to her present experiences of daily prayer and reflection in the New Mexican desert. The program was developed using traditional documentary methods, meaning that the script was developed after following Meinrad Craighead around for several years. Additional footage of lectures, workshops, and visits to her studio are included. During the years of documentation, Craighead offered regular access to her studio for interviews in Albuquerque and joined the crew on a pilgrimage to Spain.

The documentary includes additional interviews with Rosemary Davies, a scholar of the history of western philosophy; Eugenia Parry, an art historian; Rachael Wooten, a Jungian analyst; and former students of Craighead’s. These voices place the work of Meinrad Craighead in a global, historical, religious, and artistic context and help to gauge the effect the artist’s work has on others. Original music, a significant representation of Craighead’s artwork, and samples of her extraordinary collection of historic images of the Divine Feminine complete this compelling biography of a national treasure who interprets for us the wellspring of her art and scholarship.