Dorothy Wiley made films in the 1960s and 1970s with Gunvor Nelson, who is now one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the classic American avant-garde film genre.

 

Their debut, film Schmeerguntz (1966), is a humorous and grotesque feminist classic in which the everyday life of a mother of small children is contrasted with the ideal image of the American woman. Entering the film on a lark, Schmeerguntz took First Prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1966, and received an award from the San Francisco International Film Festival.

 

Dorothy Wiley was born in Kingston, PA, in 1935.  Her family settled in Richland, WA, where her father was an electrical engineer working on the first full-scale nuclear reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reserve.  She attend Gonzaga and the University of Oregon, where she majored in English.  After meeting Wiley in Richland at a party they were soon married in 1959.  They returned to San Francisco where Wiley was studying at the California Instiute for the Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute).  They had two sons together: Ethan and Zane.  They divorced in 2001.

 

Now considered a groundbreaking "feminist" filmmaker, Dorothy confesses that she wasn't aware of her iconic status and remarked, "I didn't know we were making feminist films.  We were just making moves about our lives and what interested us."

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In 2025-26, "Schmeerguntz" was featured in the Sixties Surreal exhibition at the Whitney Museum, in New York, where critic Ben Davis described the film as the highlight of exhibition, (which included works by Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, HC Westermann, her ex-husband WIlliam T. Wiley ,and many other world-famous artists): 

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      "The 1960s are recalled as an era of libidinal revolt after the repressive ‘50s, and French Surrealism was associated with a revolt against reason and authority that would resonate with the era’s New Left. This progressive association is key to the Whitney’s framing of a diffuse surrealist energy as a guide to the art of the era here.

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      No single art work might make this connection better than one that is shown high up on a wall in the show’s first gallery:    Schmeerguntz (1966), a stunner of a collage film co-directed by the duo of Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley. It was memorably described by the critic Ernest Callenbach as “one big, long raucous belch in the face of the American home,” a 15-minute choreographed riot of images juxtaposing glam beauty ads and Miss America pageant footage with a bunch of messy images of domestic life—all the less seemly stuff that was stuffed down and not talked about in those pre-feminist times."

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      Here is an artwork that legitimately can claim to have changed the world. “As I watched [the film],” feminist activist Carol Hanisch would remember later of seeing Schmeerguntz, “it dawned on me that the Miss America pageant would be a really great way to get women’s liberation in the public consciousness.” Nelson and Wiley’s difficult artwork was thus inspiration for the 1968 protest of Miss America in Atlantic City that would vault feminism to being a national topic of discussion. In a creative protest that echoes the film’s themes, protesters hurled “instruments of female torture” like high heels, girdles, and women’s magazines into a Freedom Trash Can. Whether anyone burned a bra is still debated, but it’s where the cliché comes from."

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Renowned director David Cronenberg has cited Schmeerguntz as a major influence.

 

Dorothy's filmography includes films such as Before Need Redressed (1994) which debuted at the inagural Mill Valley Film Festival, Zane Forbidden (1972), Five Artists: BillBobBillBillBob (1971), and Fog Pumas (1967), among others.

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Dorothy's small fabric Slant Step sculpture has been featured in multiple art exhibitions over the years, including the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis in 2026.​

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