Floria Sigismondi makes music videos filled with exquisitely tortured souls, who twitch and writhe within color-drenched surrealist underworlds. They’re bleak, haunting, and breathtakingly beautiful – the sort of theatrical masterpieces one would expect from a woman who was born in Italy to opera singer parents, raised in Ontario, and regards Fellini, Frida Kahlo, and Hans Balmer as her artistic idols.

No surprise her work has lured the likes of Marilyn Manson, Bjork, David Bowie, The Cure, and The White Stripes.

But where do all her ideas come from? “I’m not really sure. All I can say is quiet, mid-dream states. I used to lock myself in a room for three days, and not talk to anyone.” Nowadays, with a 1-year-old daughter named Tosca (the husband/father is Living Things frontman Lillian Berlin), her states of fatigue are easier to achieve. “And I only make videos for music I can get lost in,” she adds. “I listen to the songs over and over ‘til there are no words anymore, just emotion.”

“The Sigur Ros song [Untitled #1] made me cry. I had to stop listening to it. And all I could think of was walking around New York after September 11th with a gas mask on. I’m in this metropolitan city, and all I can hear is my own breath.” Her video for the Icelandic band, which portrays children running around in a post-apocalyptic playground, won “Best Video” at the 2003 MTV European Music Awards.

As for last year’s Blue Orchid video for The White Stripes, which cast Karen Elson in a lacy white dress alongside future husband Jack White (“you sensed an energy between them”), Sigismondi inexplicably saw Jack as the devil. “At first he’s the apple. Then he becomes the snake, then the horse that mounts Karen, who plays Eve, and makes love to her, and the rest is history,” she recalls with a laugh.

Currently, Sigismondi is working on her first film, Behind the Ballyhoo Blues. And, during this past New York Fashion Week, she celebrated the release of her second book, Immune, which contains her photographs from the past five years, and explores – as she puts it --“the state you go into to survive your surroundings.”

“Being frustrated with war and politics, and at the same time, bringing magic into the world with a baby – it’s been quite dramatic for me. It’s hard to understand how anyone can put an end to life after experiencing something like that.”

Enter Sigismondi’s World:

Immune, $69, and more on Sigismondi, floriasigismondi.com

The Living Things, Ahead of the Lions, $12, amazon.com. For more on the band and tour dates, livingthingsmusic.com

Get a Mamiya 645, the only camera Sigismondi shoots with, mamiya.com