Diving right in: Adrian’s Every Time I Dive won Best of Category this spring in the Florida Student Filmmaker/USF division of the HCC-Ybor Festival of the Moving Image. Her film The Great Indication won an honorable mention the year before. She’s in her senior year at USF, pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the department of Digital Video and Electronic Arts.

Dream on: She’s fascinated with “the borders between dreamscape and the real world,” she says, and her films tend to live in that interim state, often with herself as the primary focus. In Dive, she dives repeatedly into a pool, each time being judged Olympics-style by a woman on a TV screen who holds up scores that become more and more cryptic. In Eye Contact, Errico becomes the screen, as shadows flicker over a closeup of her eyes, the image interrupted by flashes of light, men’s and women’s faces and shadowy vignettes of a woman crouched in a shower, as if in pain. Through quick cuts, projections and other manipulations of the medium, Errico’s short films keep the viewer just off-kilter, wondering what will unfold. “Her work is highly sensory — tactile, yet ephemeral,” says Anat Pollock of DVEA. “In her exploration of her own psyche, upon viewing, we are thus drawn to into our own musings of discomfort and emotion to the world around us.”

Why she uses herself as a subject: "I always joke that I never have to worry about anybody not showing up for a shoot… I think the reason i use myself is because the process is really cathartic for me. I’m kind of a nervous person — I’m nervous doing this interview right now… Doing it by myself, [if] I have complete control over the end product and feel proud enuogh to show it to people, it’s really sort of liberating for me. Also, I guess my work is very personal. It examines [what] I feel about life and culture. It’s natural to use myself."

How she discovered photography and video: A darkroom class at age 14 with Maida Millan at the West Tampa Center for the Arts started it all. Adrian continued taking Saturday classes for five years, through high school (tiny Lee Academy for Gifted Education in Carrollwood) into USF, where she began as a photography major until the program’s emphasis shifted to digital. “So on a whim I tried video — which is ironic because it’s extremely digital.”

The directors she likes: Miranda July (The Future); Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void). “Enter the Void is really, really dark. Everything that happens is experimental and strange. If I were to make a [narrative] movie, it would be more along these lines: show people something they haven’t seen before.”

A family artistic streak: Her mother’s a writer/editor for Aubrey Organics and a published poet; her father works for an electronics company but has been in a band for years. “I feel like i got my technical side from him,” says Adrian. He knows electric wiring, so he’s the go-to guy when an amplifier needs fixing — handy skill for a musician.

We know what she did on her summer vacation: She got back into painting and photography on a scholarship at the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France.

But she still prefers video art to painting: With video, “Nothing is messy, nothing is complicated. I can plug in my hard drive, get everything arranged, I can press undo, there are a thousand options. With painting I get nervous about painting over a mark I already made.” What’s next? Her senior thesis project, which will probably have something to do with Jungian psychology. I want to see what he has to say about the collective unconscious because that seems like something I’m trying to reach in my videos.”

Take a look at her work here: adrianerrico.tumblr.com.