Over her three-decade career, Ericka Beckman’s playful yet formally demanding films challenge traditional aesthetic, and cultural values, that mix games with fairytales to create hybrids with new rules. Beckman uses play in every sense to shape her message.

The result is a ‘satisfying, even delightful slipperiness of meaning, a mental vertigo induced by the changefulness of contexts and rules in regard to a given word or object.
—Sally Banes, Millenium Film Journal, 1984

Beckman’s work has been shown at festivals, museums, and galleries around the world. Her one-woman shows include: Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Le Magasin, Grenoble, France, the Tate Modern, London, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, Washington,D.C., and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has been in four Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her works are in the film collection of the Whitney Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Walker Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, plus the British Film Institute, and the Zabludowicz Collection. Amongst the numerous awards received for her work are: Two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council on the Arts grants, one from Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and a residency from the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.