Shirari Industries is Shira Golding and Ari Moore, queer vegan artists and activists living and working in Ithaca, NY. We do graphic design, blog, take lots of photos, and make music, art and films.
Shira is a filmmaker and musician who enjoys spontaneously choreographing dance routines and playing competitive sports. She has no sense of smell and is obsessed with vegan sneakers. Ari is an artist and writer who likes drawing maps and charts and is currently teaching herself to play the toy accordion. We're into self-education, progressive activism, making and enjoying art, cooking and baking good food, and living a conscious, lush life with our cat housemates Sid and Zora. We got hitched in 2006 and launched Shirari Industries in 2008.
We met at Risley, the creative and performing arts dorm at Cornell University. Ari studied anthropology and new media and started doing graphic design for campus activist groups and the school's LGBT resource center. She co-organized a national queer student conference, ran workshops on bookmaking and printmaking, and performed with Ordinary People, an anti-oppression theatre group. Shira studied film theory and production, including a semester at the British American Film Academy in London. She directed a production of Martin Sherman's Bent, did some local music gigs and made In Search of Golding Street, a personal documentary about South Africa and Israel that screened at the New York International Independent Film Festival.
After we moved to New York City in 2002, Shira worked for the nonprofit Arts Engine for five and a half years, co-directing the Media That Matters Film Festival, winner of the best nonprofit/green website at the 2005 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. For three years she served as Arts Engine's Director of Education & Outreach, creating school curricula, advising filmmakers on outreach and traveling around the country to screen films and speak about distribution, youth filmmaking and media justice. She curated and designed graphics for Media That Matters: Good Food, a collection of short films on food and sustainability and traveled to India to help launch Adobe Youth Voices, a global youth media initiative.
Ari became the first in-house graphic designer at Tekserve, a Mac shop in Chelsea. She illustrated and designed a freakshow-themed MacWorld Expo booth for the company featuring a two-headed iMac and other oddities. After doing some marketing and design for Bush Cards, Ari went independent in 2005 at arimoore.com. She designed numerous annual reports, magazines and gala invitations for New York's LGBT Community Center and created a website for The Glass Contraption, a group that uses clown theatre as a social justice tool. In addition to sites for production companies like Noruz Films, makers of the award-winning feature Man Push Cart, and sites for artists like children's book authors Janet Landay and Jeanne Betancourt, Ari has also designed and built community-driven websites for humorist Kate Clinton and the teen nutrition program Americorps EATWISE.
In 2006, Shira shifted to creative production, becoming Arts Engine's in-house designer, video editor and writer. She has edited trailers and rough-cuts for numerous documentaries and designed graphics for the films Election Day (SXSW, P.O.V.) and the award-winning Gypsy Caravan (Tribeca Film Festival, PBS). She has written numerous articles about film and social change for MediaRights.org and was editor of the Shortlist guest curator series. In 2007, Shira joined the board of MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival based in New York City.
We are currently designing and authoring the Scenarios USA REAL DEAL Film Collection, a DVD series that showcases award-winning sex ed films written by teens. We make illustrations for the Indypendent and take lots of photos (Shira's Flickr, Ari's Flickr). Ari writes for the Feminist Review, makes posters for Socialist Party of New York City, and maintains Animal Rights, an active Flickr photosharing group focused on animal equality. In 2007 she joined the steering committee of freeDimensional, a nonprofit that provides safe haven and representation to artists in need of asylum. Shira is working on an album of original music, and editing an experimental documentary about India.
