Svoboda's most recent video, Noble Savage, explores Rousseau's theory of paradise with three simultaneously related stories. A nine-minute video, it has been featured at the Knitting Factory and the Ohio Film/Video Festival; a recut version was featured at the Athens International Video Festival April 2005 and the Silverlake Film Festival 2006.
In March 2002, the Getty screened Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance, co-directed by Terese Svoboda, featuring it as one of two examples of outstanding experimental biography on film. Women Make Movies and the MacArthur Foundation distribute this ITVS-funded film. It was also featured at MoMA, PBS, AFI, Berlin Videofest, Atlanta Arts Festival, with an honorable mention at the Columbus Film Festival. The film makes exceptional use of text-with-image throughout, animating quotes, newspaper headlines, and historical footnotes to obviate the use of talking heads.
Svoboda was sole videographer for Rogue Transmissions, which uses one of her poems published in the Virginia Quarterly Review as text for exploring how a woman experienced seeing her dead son on tape with a new son at her side. It was featured at Ars Electronica, AFI, Long Beach Museum of Art, Art Brasilia, WNYC "Poetry Spots," L.A.C.E. and "Shameless Shorts" on Lifestyle TV.
Svoboda was also videographer for EPA Poisons EPA, a 27 minute documentary about her sister brain-damaged by the air at EPA headquarters, featured at MoMA, Berkeley's Superfest, Environmental Film Festival, L.A. Freewaves, Freespeech TV, Labor at the Crossroads and 19 public access channels and in distribution with Act Now; Headhunters, a 15 minute satire on colonialism in which a white boy gets his first head, featured at the Worldwide Video Festival, Long Beach Museum of Art, L.A. Freewaves, Pasadena Art Museum, Pacific Film Archives, Mixed Signals, L.A.C.E.; To See or Not To See, a 14 minute meditation on Papua New Guinea's giant walking sticks as the Other, featured at MoMA, U. of Chicago, Simon Watson Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Finnish Women's Media Festival, International Women's Day, and a Voice Choice; Orphans, a 23 minute tape starring Mabou Mines' Bill Raymond, Les Miserables' Terence Mann and Caroline Simonds, about the seduction of a fortuneteller by Defoe at the end of the world, funded by the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, FVA, and Harvestworks; and Lust, a 9 minute video on surveillance and sexual metaphor about a balloonist who tracks down her lover, featured at MoMA, New American Makers, Experimental Narrative Award at Athens Film/Video Festival, the Atlanta Film/Video Festival, "Director's Choice," and "Shameless Shorts," Lifestyle TV.
Svoboda co-curated Between Word and Image with MoMA, a lecture/exhibition series on poetry and video presented with Poets House, in Banff and the Northwest Film and Video Center. She also curated Cast Iron TV, an artist-produced public access TV series on Manhattan Cable for six years, praised by Dan Rather and cited by the NY Times critic Douglas Davis as "what TV should be doing."
Solo Exhibitions: Pink Pony, Harvestworks, Knitting Factory, NYU, NYPL.
She is also the author of nine books, most recently Tin God, her fourth novel, published by the University of Nebraska.
She was born and raised in Ogallala, Nebraska and graduated from the University of British Columbia (B.F.A. in studio art and creative writing) and Columbia University (M.F.A. in writing.)
She worked on documentaries in the Cook Islands and the Sudan for the National Anthropological Film Center, and produced a series on translation for the Translation Center at Columbia and the pilot for Voices & Visions, a 13 part series for PBS on American poets.
Cast Iron TV was the longest running, artist-run cable series ever. Begun by Liza Bear in the early 80's, its half hour of video art programming (sometimes commissioned) was broadcast once a week until the late 80's on Manhattan Cable. One of its earlier shows featured a program which later became Deep Dish and Paper Tiger.
Milli Iatrou (now an extremely successful Hollywood sound designer) took over in 1983. Terese Svoboda took over from her in 1985. Critic Douglas Davis reviewed the series in the NYT in 1987, saying it was "what TV should be." Dan Rather telephoned to express his interest in the show. Betsy Newman took over in 1992 but couldn't continue it.