BIOGRAPHY:

Born Salvatore Mendoza II in Rome, NY in 1970, Torry has been my moniker since childhood. I come from a diverse ethnic background of Mescalero Apache (although, Onondaga in loyalty and association), Mexican, and Puerto Rican descent (patrilineal); and Irish, English, Austrian descent (matrilineal). I am a 1991 alumnus of Munson-Williams-Proctor-Institute School of Art (now Pratt at Munson-Williams-Proctor) in Utica, NY; completing my formal undergraduate study at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2002; receiving a B.F.A. in film and a B.A. in studio arts. I have performed volunteer work as an undergraduate on petitions for the release of Leonard Peltier in conjunction with the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (LPDC), while serving as a Council Member on the University of Colorado’s Native American Student Organization, Oyate. I was also privileged to work for the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), primarily through their National Indian Law Library (NILL) in Boulder, CO for four years in numerous positions. Currently, I am a second year film graduate student at Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. In January 2006, I will be presenting two papers at the 4th Annual Hawai’i International Conference on Arts and Humanities as well as contributing writing in Fall 2005 entitled, “Fourth World Cinema and Media Art” in the publication, Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Practices and Politics, edited by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart.


ARTIST STATEMENT:

Through the utilization of film and digital media, I approach various aspects of Native American life that have either historically negatively affected or currently affect the portrayal, identity and representation of Native Americans in mainstream White America by challenging and questioning the commonly accepted understanding of Native American history, misrepresentations and stereotypes. Most importantly, I have chosen to concentrate my efforts on providing my education and skills to the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the preservation of their culture. I am also interested in re-appropriating the Native American as well as the Indigenous image back to Native American and Indigenous communities on a local, regional and global scale. Finally, through the further development of the emergent Fourth Cinema theory, I hope to provide Native American and Indigenous communities the power to control their own image through the re-education of non-Native/non-Indigenous critical and theoretical thinkers. This is a contemporary construct that will definitely prove controversial in the academic world because of its militant stance of the reassertion and redirection of power over one’s own image and how the representation of that image must be defined, theorized, critiqued and analyzed by the global Indigenous community, instead of the privileged White mainstream theorists, academics and critics.