Early Life and Education
Keller was born in 1950 in Yorktown, New York. The youngest of seven children, Keller grew up in a large, upper-middle-class, Protestant family. As a girl, Keller's mother schooled her in the feminine arts of cooking, gardening and entertaining.
Keller never gave up these skills (she even used them as inspiration for her films), even though other feminists of her time frowned upon such domestic jobs. B. Ruby Rich (a friend of Keller's and another important member of the feminist film movement), fondly remembers a Passover dinner that Keller made in this passage from her memoir:
"And the food was great, because Margie was already a fabulous cook: for a rebel girl of that era, she was remarkably versed in the female arts."
Keller first attended Tufts University, but finished her coursework at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after getting expelled from Tufts for participating in a protest in 1972. She then went on to pursue her master's degree and then her doctorate in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1975. During her years at Tufts and the Art Institute of Chicago, Keller was instructed by American avant-garde filmmakers Saul Levine and Stan Brakhage.
Read more about this topic: Marjorie Keller
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The education of females has been exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty. ... though well to decorate the blossom, it is far better to prepare for the harvest.”
—Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870)