Documentarist, programmer. One of Montreal’s distinct independent Anglo lesbian voices, Concordia-trained Kearns is known chiefly within the queer circuit for two films, If the Family Fits (51 , 1994) and Choir Girls (52 , 1998). The latter was a loving, sprightly communal portrait of a Montreal women’s choir, whereas the former was a measured, aesthetically resourceful essay on alternative families, including cutaways to Real Women spokesdemogogues who hang themselves with their own microphone cords. Kearns’s interest in the “lesbian continuum” and left/feminist politics surfaced in her NFB production Democracy à la Maude (1998), a portrait of anti-globalization activist Maude Barlow, which had the distinction of being baited for its state-funded “partiality” by the parliamentary Right. Kearns more recently has been an activist within women’s new media arts organizations. In 1988 Kearns helped found Image + Nation and continued her involvement into the 1990s.