Leslie Streit

Leslie Streit and Robin McCain became producing partners in the 1990s when they opened the Nouveau Theater an experimental performance space inside a working cannery. They created original works which synthesized art, dance, film, music, audience and community involvement. Most notably “Vlad Draculea in the Year 2000” which toured to the Edinburgh Festival and then evolved into one of the very first serial dramas to appear on the World Wide Web. In the early 2000’s the team became known as Cinematiks. As writer/director/producer Streit's 2005 “God Wears My Underwear”, a documentary-narrative hybrid, tied the 1940s Jewish Holocaust to the 1950s genocide in Tibet. It was screened at several international festivals and was awarded Best Film at the DNA Film Festival in Toronto. Additional honors include Selected Artist at the Hong Kong Arts Biennial 2002, a 2009 Webby and several screenplay awards. Streit was twice awarded the Producer's Mark (p.g.a.) for her documentary films. Documentary feature “Elly and Henry” (2017) is distributed by Espresso Media International and currently streams on Amazon. In 2021 Streit directed and co-produced an experimental short, “95 Days”, about climate change that received many international awards. Her 2022 feature documentary “An American Ballet Story” appeared at festivals in the US, Europe and Asia. It is distributed by Random Media and has won multiple awards. The documentary now appears on platforms including Amazon, Tubi and Fandango at Home. During 2022-2023 Streit and McCain created a trilogy of experimental shorts structured as an immersive video installation “When I Become A Ghost”. This project premiered at Pastine Projects in San Francisco in February 2024, was exhibited in October 2024 at the CICA Museum in Seoul Korea, screened at The International Multimedia Festival of Wales in November and at the Pluribus Multimedia Fest in Naples Italy in February 2025 where it won Best New Media Film. The installation currently remains on exhibit at the Jus Museum in Naples. Most recently Streit and McCain began work on a new multimedia installation “Five Dreams & a Drop of Blood” about a Vampire nightclub (Club V) in San Francisco where dreams are for sale. They hope to complete this project in 2025 and in the meantime it has been featured in “The Surreal World – Special Edition” magazine and a new book: “101 Contemporary Artists”. The team continues to live and work in San Francisco.