Swenson’s artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has received numerous prestigious awards and grants, one of them the Creative Work Fund, seeding production on her first feature length social justice film “Mission Movie”. “Mission Movie” is a fictional adaptation of true-life stories from the Mission District of San Francisco and was screened internationally, winning five awards, two for Best of Festival. Swenson also served as producer and assistant director on  ”Strange Culture” which premiered at Sundance.

 

Most recently she was Filmmaker in Residence at the deYoung Museum where she produced an alternative iPhone app entitled dYinterpretaions.

 

Swenson has been a media arts theory and production instructor, and an active member in the Bay Area media arts since the 1980s.  In 1984 she co-founded ATA, (Artists’ Television Access), a non-profit media arts exhibition and education facility. She then went on to serve for many years on the ATA board as President and was also a Film Arts Foundation board member and a member of the SF Art Institute Artists’ Committee. In 1995 Swenson founded TILT (Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools), a nonprofit that works within schools and community organizations to teach the fundamentals of media literacy and moviemaking.