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Cresswell, who’s 24, credits her interest in other cultures to her own unsettled childhood and adolescence. Her parents divorced when she was an infant, her father died when she was 12, and around the same time her mother was deemed temporarily unfit for parenting. Cresswell spent two years in a foster home, and after her mother regained custody in 1992 the two moved from Berkley, Massachusetts, to Deltona, Florida, a small city on the edge of Orlando’s sprawl where Cresswell says she felt stifled. In Massachusetts, she’d been involved in theater and other activities, but there wasn’t much going on in Deltona, and her high school classes were covering material she’d already studied. In addition, she couldn’t adjust to living with her mother. “By that time I was so independent,” she says. “I’d been on my own for a long time.” A year or so after relocating, she became an emancipated minor, supporting herself working two jobs while finishing high school. In 1996, after a brief stint in Miami, she moved to Chicago.
Cresswell also signed on as one of the organizers of Ladyfest Midwest, last summer’s three-day women’s arts festival. She taped some of the festival’s participants–locals like performance artist Jennifer Reeder as well as out-of-towners like Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna–and found other subjects by asking around. So far she’s collected roughly 60 hours of footage and interviewed 25 artists from across the country, though only 10 or 12 will make the 30-minute final cut.
