 Who are the Dangerous Old Women?
Sheila, Kirsten and Kundalini
Dangerous Old Women Productions was formed by its two co-directors, Sheila Foster, M.A., and Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander, M.F.A., in March of 1998.
Both women are visual artists and both have undergone major kundalini initiations. When Sheila Foster experienced her kundalini awakening, she found no books or support systems available to validate her experience. In response to this, she was guided to establish the School for Women Healers in Maryland twenty years ago. Sheila continues to steward the School, maintain a private practice, teach healing, and lead spiritual retreats. Educated originally as a psychotherapist, Sheila now trains and supervises therapists and healing practitioners in a psycho-spiritual healing process that she developed, called Samyama Healing. Sheila felt directed to learn about filmmaking, and to later establish a film production company, so that she could support women beyond the School for Women Healers in their spiritual search and kundalini awakening.
When Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander began to experience her kundalini awakening, she was extremely fortunate to discover the School for Women Healers. Her participation in the School for Women Healers for the past ten years has profoundly inspired her filmmaking. One of her first films, A Cultural Object: The Tampon, which chronicles a young woman's shame around menstruation, won a Rosebud Award, a Peer Award and was screened at The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center, on PBS and in several other venues in the United States.
Kirsten is the founder of the Center for Yoga Drawing and Painting, a vessel devoted to the recognition that we do not make art -- we are art. Everything that moves through us to the picture plane, canvas, sketchbook, etc. is already in us.
Their first film
Kirsten and Sheila collaborated for the first time when they made Embracing the Divine Feminine. Embracing documents a Sacred Lover initiation retreat held in Mexico, where the women participants experienced the transmutation of shame about their bodies into feelings of joy. Embracing the Divine Feminine was screened at the Moondance International Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. Embracing is being re-edited and will be available for sale soon.
Tribute to Women in the Community
Our films are a tribute to the generosity of the women of the Temple of the Sacred Feminine. Making these films has been completely collaborative--the women have "starred" in them, served as film crew, production assistants, and baby-sitters. They have also contributed funds and participated in silent auctions so that we could buy equipment and film. Everything we need is continually provided by the Divine Mother, often magically.
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is to show how every challenge in our ordinary lives can be a portal to embodying our womanliness along with our holiness. Every experience, no matter how awful, can open to grace, to love, to peace, if we are willing to feel what is. We don’t have to like or condone it—we simply must feel it. We can open to a level of aliveness never before imagined.