Background and Career
She grew up in Berkeley, California, where her father, computer scientist Richard Fateman is a professor at UC Berkeley. On the official Le Tigre website, Fateman refers to filmmaker Miranda July as being her "best friend from high school"; July is also from Berkeley. At the age of seventeen Fateman moved to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College, which she later left for art school in New York.
Fateman began her writing career producing zines including My Need To Speak on the Subject of Jackson Pollock; ArtaudMania!!! The Diary of a Fan; The Opposite, Part I; and SNARLA, which she co-wrote with Miranda July. It was through her zines that Fateman first met bandmate Kathleen Hanna. At a performance of Hanna's band Bikini Kill, Fateman gave Hanna a copy of one of her zines. As Hanna has related in interviews, she was impressed and inspired by Fateman's writing and the two kept in touch. Later, when Bikini Kill was on a hiatus, Kathleen Hanna moved to Portland, Oregon, where she and Fateman lived with several other women in an off-campus Reed College house known as "The Curse". (All such "Reed Houses" have a clever or ironic name of some sort.) Radio Sloan who also lived at The Curse, taught Fateman how to play her first songs on a bass guitar that cost $60.
Around this time, Hanna and Fateman formed their first band together, The Troublemakers, named after the film of the same name by G.B. Jones. The band played at house parties in Portland but broke up when Fateman moved to New York. Hanna soon followed her to the east coast and the two women joined forces with filmmaker Sadie Benning to form Le Tigre. After their first album Benning left the band to return to making films. JD Samson joined the line up for Feminist Sweepstakes, their next release. The band's most recent album is This Island & as of January 2007, they are on hiatus.
While working with Le Tigre, Fateman started her own solo project called Swim With the Dolphins, named after a book by the same title with the subtitle "How Women Can Succeed in Corporate America on Their Own Terms". She made a five-song cassette entitled "the struggle for the full exercise of woman's equality" during the winter of 1999, which she describes as "sample-based, dj/dance-floor inspired music for the feminist rave in my head." She was also the sound-designer for experimental filmmaker Cecilia Dougherty's Gone.
Read more about this topic: Johanna Fateman
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