This is Maya Deren, the artist who transcended boundaries, friends with Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, but who very much went her own way. Born in the Ukraine, she lived in the US as a child and teenager when her parents emigrated, then went to Smith, NY and LA. She danced (for Katherine Dunham), she made films (which were very influential), she wrote, she was very much a part of the avant garde.

This still from her 1944 film, At Land, part of the Met's Surrealism Without Borders exhibition, captures some of her moxie. It was filmed in Amagansett. It's subtext drifts with the sand and sea around the notion of depaysement, or homelessness. She did not like to be lumped in with the Surrealists but she understood she shared some of their concerns around poetic and dream states.

Deren died at 44 in 1961 from a brain hemorrhage. She became addicted to the infamous Dr. Max Jacobson's speed and had more or less stopped eating.