Barbara Jean Hammer (May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019) was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer.

Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life.

In 1961, Hammer graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and married Clayton Henry Ward, on the condition that he take her traveling around the world.

In 1992, she released her first feature film, Nitrate Kisses, an experimental documentary about the marginalization of LGBT people in the 20th century.

Her early films, made during her time at San Francisco State University, focused on female and homosexual topics and embodied the 1970s notion of cultural feminism.

During this early stage of Hammer's career, especially in the mid-1970s, her role as the only women filmmaker who openly claimed as a lesbian was widely indicated in her works.

There are many physical and sexual representations of the female body, emphasizing the idea of expressing love, desire, and erotic pleasure between lesbians openly.

Those films aim to illustrate personal and private ideas and beliefs and hope the audience can get physically involved.

[5][4] Hammer was actively involved in media making industry during this period, including learning new skills and techniques, organizing premieres of her own works, opening film workshops and lessons that are related to women filmmaking, etc.

[7] There are many intimate shots in Dyketactics: women take off their clothes and dance with each other, embrace with nature and touch each other, and there is a love-making sequence, which Hammer is personally involved in.

[6] The slow and gentle actions of the women onscreen and the use of superimpositions and careful framing make those erotic scenes romantic and sensual, differentiating this film from pornography in both narrative and visual forms.

Hammer's choice of cinematography in Superdyke was noticeable; for example, she used close-up to capture female bodies on the beach in order to emphasize the tactile sensation of the bodies and the surrounding; she panned the camera together with female characters' movements in a dancing scene to create the motive sensation.

[1] Moving from simple representations of bodies which was not recognized as fine art, Hammer's focus shifted to more formal works.

Hammer's voice-over commentary and various older lesbians' testimonies are accompanied by shots of desolate scenery and depressed city views, creating a strong sense of incompleteness and precariousness.

[4][9][10][3] Hammer's late career coincides with her rise to public prominence with museum retrospectives and her acquisition of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Those footages are juxtaposed with comic intent, making the style of the film relatively light and comedic.

It includes a melding of performance, artistic installation, and film, acting as a culmination of her involvement with the right-to-die movement.

[3] Hammer created more than 80 moving image works throughout her life, and also received a great number of honors.

[2] In 2007, Hammer was honored with an exhibition and tribute at the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging Center in Taipei.

She also had exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London and at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2012; for the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival; and at the Koch Oberhuber Woolfe in Berlin in both 2011 and 2014.

[2] A cumulative list of her acquired awards is available below: Hammer was an avant-garde filmmaker and focused a large sum of her films on feminist or lesbian topics.

"[15] Her films were regarded as being controversial because they focused on taboo, feminine topics such as menstruation, the female orgasm, and lesbianism.

[18] Hammer's early films utilized natural imagery, such as trees and fruit, associating them with the female body.

"[21] According to Michael Schell, "her relentless pursuit of an artistic vision, informed by the American tradition of experimental cinema, whose integrity was personal, not simply political, can pose a challenge to the assumptions of both sub- and mainstream cultures".

[2] In 2020, filmmaker Lynne Sachs created the Ann Arbor Festival Award, for the creation of a film that best conveys Hammer's celebration of the female experience.