Emily Barresi is a photographer and filmmaker from Connecticut. With family roots in theater and motion-picture industries, the veil between melodrama and the ordinary often wore thin in her formative years. Working with nonprofessional actors and extras, she encourages subjects to toe the line between their stage personas and true identities. Emily is interested in how easily the brain can mythologize experience, and how the act of re-performing personal history can alter the initial happening. Still heavily influenced by film, television, and theater, she continues to create a cinematic reality of her own through photographic portraiture and experimental video work.