Skate and Create

At the end of her second year in LSA’s film and video department, Dana Mendelssohn (A.B. ’88) considered bringing her skateboard from home, to ride around campus and Ann Arbor for the summer. But something gave her pause. Mendelssohn, who now goes by Dana Forrester, was worried that she would be harassed by male skateboarders. Luckily, her friends weren’t having it.

“Dana was an inspiration,” her friend and fellow LSA film alum Danny Plotnick (A.B. ’86) says. At the time, Forrester was a brilliant student who played in Detroit punk bands like The Vertical Pillows and had a “take no prisoners mentality,” Plotnick says. U-M art student Karen Kibler (B.F.A., Teach. Cert., ’88) said she’d bring her own skateboard to campus to ride alongside Forrester. Instead of being afraid of skating on campus as a woman, Plotnick joked that Forrester, Kibler, and their friend, LSA student Jenny Parker (A.B., ’87), should start a gang.

That spring, Forrester, Kibler, and Parker joined Plotnick on the Diag. They brought their pet rats and a pair of skateboards. Plotnick had a Super 8 camera and a tight script.

The film they made in 1986, titled Skate Witches, is barely two minutes long and features the three women hanging tough in leather jackets. Plotnick directed.

Parker introduces the gang: “We’re the Skate Witches, and we don’t take no crap from nobody.” Forrester, in a Misfits T-shirt, sneers that she’s “the best female skateboarder in town. I’ll fight anyone who begs to differ.” And Kibler declares herself the Queen Witch, who only rides at midnight (Plotnick confesses that Kibler just didn’t want to ride a board on film). The frenetic punk song “Skate and Destroy” by The Faction rages as the witches display their rats and their skateboarding prowess. Parker pushes two preppy guys off their skateboards. Both times, they collapse, chastened, while Parker runs off with their boards.

Neither Plotnick nor the three witches could have guessed that anyone would be talking about Skate Witches 40 years after its creation. But sometime in the early 2000s the film resurfaced on YouTube and attained cult status. Since then, Skate Witches has inspired ’zines, profiles and shout-outs in Maximum Rocknroll, Vogue, and The New York Times, as well as female skate crews the world over.

The film was a project that this group of friends assigned themselves—despite Forrester and Plotnick both studying film, Skate Witches wasn’t made to fulfill a class requirement. “All the women in the film were life-changing friends of mine,” Plotnick says. The film was a testament to those friendships, and to the scrappy persistence of a punk ethos, he says.

“That summer I just wanted to keep getting better at making films. When you’re in a band like Dana, you write one song, then when you’re done, you write another song. Karen, for example, is a really good fine artist—and fine artists just keep making things. That’s how they get better.”

Kibler, the Queen Witch, used the intaglio skills she was developing as a U-M art student to paint the Skate Witches logo on the back of the leather jacket that Forrester wears in the film.

At the end of 2025, that iconic leather jacket was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. The jacket will live as part of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s permanent collection.

When Forrester heard that the Smithsonian was interested, she found the jacket in the back of her closet. “I’ve lived all over the world,” Forrester says. “And I don’t live in the past. But somehow this jacket has stayed with me for decades. It doesn’t even fit me anymore.”

“I was just floored,” she says about the Smithsonian’s acquisition. “When I was a kid, my family took me to that museum. It was a formative experience, and having the jacket there now is such validation.”

Forrester says that she felt like an outsider on campus in the 1980s, and the film was a playful, but authentic, way to shine a light on that. “But we were proud of who we were, and we embraced our creativity and our differences,” she says.

At LSA, Forrester found her people, and she also discovered that filmmaking—along with other forms of art, like music and skateboarding—could be “passports to other places and experiences.” After graduation, she traveled the world, filming punk rock culture from San Francisco to Jamaica. Now back in Southeast Michigan, Forrester owns four tattoo shops and plays in two rock bands.

Parker later received her doctorate in education, and Kibler is a working artist.

Plotnick, who started at U-M in 1983 with the idea he’d be a history or business major, took a Russian history class that introduced him to Russian and Eastern European cinema. “That was my epiphany,” he says. “I knew I had to make films.”

After graduation, Plotnick continued making films, and he now directs the film program at the University of San Francisco. He uses Skate Witches in the classroom as an example of the value of not letting perfect get in the way of good. That punk rock ethos Plotnick mentions as part of his inspiration for making Skate Witches carries through to a lesson on the value of fearlessness—and completion—in art-making. Don’t have the perfect tools or a ton of money? Do it anyway, and do it yourself.

“I’ve been teaching since the early 1990s, and I always show that film [Skate Witches]. There are some really messed up things on a technical level. I always point out all the things I messed up and say, don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s all a lesson.

“A huge focus of my classes,” Plotnick says, “is to get my students to make something personal and unique. If you just want to make a genre film, you’re always going to be compared to big-budget Hollywood films. Make something that speaks to who you are, something no one else could make.”

Skate Witches, he says, took a story that hadn’t been told—what it meant to be a young woman in the 1980s skateboarding scene—and told it authentically, showing what it was like to be there.

“Look, I tell my students, I was your age when I made this film and we’re still talking about it 40 years later. So what you make now can have significant societal and cultural impact. Ultimately it’s your voice.”

Forrester mentions that she was recently contacted by someone writing a doctoral thesis on the messages of female empowerment in Skate Witches. She’s proud that the film’s message still resonates.

“It’s harder than ever now to be a woman in this world,” she says. “We can show what strength and power looks like. We need it now more than ever.”

In April 2026, the three original skate witches and director will reunite at the Independent Film Festival Ypsilanti, just down the road from Ann Arbor, to celebrate 40 years of the film.
 

Photo by Danny Plotnick