Stefan Roloff

Stefan Roloff was born in West Berlin in 1953 and moved to New York in 1981.

Stefan Roloff (born 1955 Berlin) is a German-American painter, video artist, filmmaker, and pioneer of digital video and photography, living and working in New York and Berlin.

Traveling through remote areas of West Virginia, he followed the story of a 22- year old woman who committed suicide in 1981 in an isolation cell at the State Prison for Women.

The film was combined with an installation, “Pence Springs Resort”, a life-size three-dimensional photographic rendering of the isolation cell which the viewers could physically enter.

In 1984 the New York Institute of Technology invited Roloff to experiment on prototypes of digital video and imaging computers.

It combined in large-format still images from film he had made of the GDR border regime at various of the Berlin Wall in 1984, with silhouetted portraits video of contemporary GDR witnesses.

Viewers could access their testimony through smartphone links.

Roloff's related video installation "Life in the Death Zone" is permanently installed at Villa Schöningen.

He produced "Big Fire", a blend of painting with digital media which was shown in 1986 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Also at NYIT, he developed "Moving Painting", a process in which a painting is set in motion by filming each stage that it passes through during its creation.

In his film and video projects Roloff collaborated with musicians Suicide, Martin Rev, and Andrew Cyrille, and with Peter Gabriel, with whom he produced FACE, a prototype for his video Sledgehammer, as well as the video ZAAR, for the album Passion.

In 1989, for his pioneering digital works, Roloff received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

He has since produced and directed numerous videos and two documentary films.

Each film is accompanied by an art installation, providing a three-dimensional space which the viewers can enter for a direct experience of the subject matter.

From 1989 to 1999, he worked on his first documentary film “Seeds”.

It was shown at Threadwaxing Space in New York in 1995.

In 1997 he began to work on his second documentary film The Red Orchestra, a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter against the Nazis.

For this film, Stefan Roloff received a 2002 New York City Media Arts grant from the Jerome Foundation.

He also wrote a book in German, Die Rote Kapelle, published by Ullstein in 2002.

Roloff's documentary, The Red Orchestra, a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, was nominated for Best Foreign Film 2005 by the US Women Critics Circle.

It was nominated for best foreign film 2005 by the US Women Critics Circle.

In 2015, through an initiative by Stefan Roloff, Gustin Reichbach and Ellen Meyers, The Red Orchestra was incorporated into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's permanent exhibition.

Roloff's source interviews with members of the Red Orchestra are accessible on the HMM's database.

In 2017, Roloff had a 229 meter-long installation at the East-Side Gallery in Berlin facing the Spree.