Johnny Misheff in the New York Times:
She may not be a household name, but the filmmaker Alia Raza is a name to watch and to drop. Raza, 32, is the creative force behind obscure film and video projects with fittingly abstruse titles like “The Fragile White Blossoms Emit a Hypnotic Cascade of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated.” Her dazzling cast of subjects is equally enigmatic: the teen blogger Tavi Gevinson, whom Raza recently filmed constructing a dress out of black silk and bubble gum; the artist Terence Koh, whom she had perform surgery on a white cake; and the celebutante-around-town Julia Restoin Roitfeld, who appears in Raza’s coming video project for Six Scents, a feminist take on the mythological Medusa figure. “Their notoriety is an element in the work,” Raza says of the socially prominent actors she picks. “Someone said what I do is like ‘Francesco Vezzoli going downtown,’ which is funny because I live on the Upper East Side.”
More here. [And, yes, that's my niece.]
