Sadie Benning

By Benjamin Nugent

OCCUPATION Videomaker and rock musician

GOAL To acquire deejay skills and make videos and music

QUOTE "I worship girls who make girl power...and pumpin' girly sounds."

Sadie Benning was unimpressed when her dad, an avant-garde filmmaker, gave her a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera for Christmas when she was 15. Only after New Year's did she turn it on in her bedroom and start making movies about coming of age as a lesbian teenager in Milwaukee, Wis. Her grainy, black-and-white compositions soon made their way to film festivals, and by the time she was 20 her "Pixelvision" videos were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her 1998 video Flat Is Beautiful was screened at this year's Whitney Biennial. Now Benning, 27, is bringing her lo-fi aesthetic to an older medium: rock 'n' roll.

"I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop and electronic music," says Benning. Her interests meshed with the girl-punk sensibilities of Kathleen Hanna, former singer of Bikini Kill, and the 'zine writer Johanna Fateman, with whom she formed the rock group Le Tigre last year. Their February word-of-mouth-only debut in Brooklyn packed a huge loft with so many insiders that a crowd stood listening in the snow outside. "We pretty much rotate instruments," says Benning, who assembles many of Le Tigre's beats on samplers and '80s-vintage drum machines. After its tour, the band plans to record a follow-up to last year's album. "I also want to do my own deejay projects," Benning adds. A feature film? "It's always been in the back of my mind."

--By Benjamin Nugent