T H E  U N S E E N  F E S T I V A L 2019

List of 2019 participants in The Unseen Festival:

Maite Abella, born in Lleida (Spain) is an artist based in Amsterdam. She got her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at The Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Before, she had obtained her Bachelor of Urban Geography at the Universitat de Barcelona. In her work she dedicates herself to drawing, painting and experimental short films. Her short films have been at several festivals, to highlight Forum Expanded at Berlinale, Rotterdam Film Festival, Strange Beauty Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.

Carlos Adriano. (São Paulo, Brazil, 1966). PhD in Film by University of São Paulo (USP, 2008; Fapesp’s Fellowisp [São Paulo Research Foundation]). Post Doctoral in Arts / Communications and Semiotics at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP, 2014; Fapesp’s Fellowisp). Post Doctoral in Film at USP (2017; Capes’s Fellowisp [Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel]). Retrospectives and tributes: Festival do Rio (2002); 56th Locarno Festival (Filmmakers of the Present, 2003); Belo Horizonte Short Film Festival (2004); 16th Videobrasil (curatorial axis Cinema+Arts+Vídeo, 2007). Films exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and in the Tate Modern, London. Films shown at festivals: Bilbao, Bologna, Cairo, Cartagena, Chicago, Havana, Leuven, Lussas, Madrid, Oslo, Osnabrück, Paris, Philadelphia, Pordenone, Rotterdam, Toronto, Ulaanbaatar. Filmography: Suspens (1989) / A Luz das Palavras (1992) / Remanescências (1997) / A Voz e o Vazio: a Vez de Vassourinha (1998) / O Papa da Pulp: R. F. Lucchetti (2002) / Militância (2002) / Um Caffé com o Miécio (2003) / Porviroscópio (2006) / Das Ruínas a Rexistência (2007) / Santoscópio = Dumontagem (2009) / Santos Dumont Pré-Cineasta? (2010) / sem título # 1 : Dance of Leitfossil (2014) / sem título # 2: la mer larme (2015) / sem título # 3 : E para que Poetas em Tempo de Pobreza? (2016) / Festejo Muito Pessoal (2017) / sem título # 4 : Apesar dos Pesares, na Chuva Há de Cantares (2018)

Akusuo is a spoken word poet, essayist and speaker on homelessness. Originally from Dallas, she studied welding at Job Corps and multi discipline studies at University of New Mexico. My focus is on the relationship between black mothers and daughters, generational trauma, madness and survival. 

Francisco Álvarez Ríos, Bachelor of Cinema and Audiovisual graduated from the University of Cuenca. Director and programmer of the Lucid Chamber – Cinematographic Meetings and Co-director of the editorial platform specialized in GOD / ART cinema. As a director, he stands out for his short-films Ernesto (2012 – 30`), Store (2015 – 31`) and Lost Paradise (commissioned for the 2016 Biennial Foundation of Cuenca – 34`). He is currently continuing to develop new single-person experimental film processes.

Crisosto Apache, originally from Mescalero, New Mexico (US), on the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné / Navajo. His Diné clans are Salt Clan born for the Towering House Clan. He holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Crisosto is an Assistant Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College for Art + Design. He is the Associate Poetry Editor for the Offing Magazine. He also continues his advocacy work for the Native American LGBTQ / ‘two spirit’ identity. Crisosto’s debut collection GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) stems from the vestiges of memory and cultural identity of a self-emergence as language, body, and cosmology. Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Nominee), Cream City Review, Plume Anthology, Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, photographer Christopher Felver’s Tending the Fire. and most recently The Poetry Foundation’s POETRY Magazine June 2018 issue. Crisosto Apache Website: http://crisostoapache.com/ Book order Link: http://amzn.to/2FzG409Lost Alphabet’s website: http://www.lostalphabet.com/genesis/

Anna Beata Baranska was born on November 28th in 1981 in Ilza (Poland). From 2001 to 2006 she studied Painting in the Faculty of Arts Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. She graduated under professor Jacek Wojciechowski and her diploma was awarded the Dean prize. Since 2006 she has worked in her mother school, firstly as a graduate student instructor in the Department of Traditional and Experimental Graphic Art, then since 2009 as a teaching assistant and since 2016 she is awarded a PHD in arts. Since November 2017 she works as a Associate Dean of Art and Research in the Faculty of Arts Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. She specializes in Painting and Video. In her works, she touches time passing issues as well as political, cultural and anthropological problems. She has been awarded over a dozen times. Since 2007 her works were screened or exhibited at about 90 international and 70 national festivals and exhibitions.

Alexander Bayer, MA, b. 1984 in Hanau, Germany. Studied theatre, film and media studies in Vienna and Bologna. Works after years in print journalism and television as a documentary filmmaker.

Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand lives and works in Quebec City. She holds an MFA in which she focused on the ethical and aesthetic stance of the frivolous in her practice. During her MFA studies, she was selected to carry out a residency at La Bande Vidéo with assistance from Fonds Fondation-René-Richard of the École d’art of Université Laval. She has taken part in many multidisciplinary events that combine sound, video and performance. Her animation films have been shown at numerous festivals, notably in Canada, Catalonia, France, Germany, Italy and Russia and the US.

Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk, Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea and the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jason is also a co-founder of the experimental media art non-profit organization Signal Culture and is currently an Assistant Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.

Debora Bernagozzi is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Signal Culture, an experimental media art nonprofit organization that provides residencies, resources, and exhibition opportunities for artists, researchers, and innovators working in the field. She continues her practice as an internationally exhibited artist working primarily in video and photography.  She teaches Photography in the Art & Art History Department and teaches in the LEAP arts entrepreneurship master’s program at CSU. Signalculture.org deborabernagozzi.com

Michele Bernier / Alberta Shulman

A Franco-German born in Geneva, Samuel Bester was studying in the school of Decorative Arts of Strasbourg in 1992 when he became aware, with the complicity of Jean-François Guiton, of the importance that video will take in his life and in his artistic research. Meetings with Sarkis, Robert Cahen, Jochen Gerz and Harun Farocki nourished his approach. At the edge of different styles, his films are of documentary and experimental inspiration.

Ryan Betschart and Rachel Nakawatase are a wife and husband team that as curators created and run the San Diego Underground Film Festival, and both program at Slamdance Film Festival. As film creators their works have played Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Chicago Underground, and have won awards at Slamdance, Indie Memphis, and Arizona Underground. Rachel holds a BFA in Costume Design from UCLA; Ryan holds a BA in Visual Arts from UCSD and an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts. 

Allison Blakeney has been dancing professionally for over 10 years in Colorado, Los Angeles, New York City, and are now again in Colorado. In this time, Allison has learned from and worked with artists, scholars, and choreographers from across the country such as Julia Ehrstrand, Nancy Cranbourne, Jenny Schiff, Wade Madsen, Sumi Clements, Malaya, Miguel Zarate, Karen Finley, Leslie Satin,  and André Lepecki. They hold an MA in Critical Dance Studies and Queer Theory (along with political theory, sociology, performance studies, and Critical Race Studies) from the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, NYU, under the mentorship of Laurie Woodard, Leslie Satin, and André Lepecki. Currently they are the Co-Director of Excessive Realness, a queer dance intensive for LGBTQIA+ people and work at the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence as a Violence Prevention Educator.

Giuseppe Boccassini is an Italian filmmaker mainly working in Germany and Italy. He graduated in film theory at the University of Bologna and in film direction at The New University of Cinema and Television located in Cinecittà, Rome.  His work has been shown at several international film festivals and exhibitions , including FID Marseille, France, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Schottland, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival , Czech Republic ,Torino Film Festival , Italy, FESTACURTAS BH , Brasil, Crossroads SF, USA, Avvistamenti , Italy, Punto de Vista, Spain, Trentino History Museum, Italy, Pesaro Film Festival, Italy. His entire film production is distributed by Light Cone. By transforming and manipulating various sources of archival material, his work reflects upon the notion of a haptic proximity of contemporary media. The director considers film as “a phallic conqueror that, folding in on itself, now flaccid deus ex machina, observes itself from the inside like a lysergic membrane that slowly founders between the folds of its own material”. His most recent collaborations include the film editing for Aldo Tambellini’s solo exhibition Black Matters, at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany and is the artist for Chicago Film Archives’ 2018 Media Mixer.  He is in charge of the programme at Fracto, an Experimental Film Encounter at ACUD macht neu, Berlin. 

Tyler Bohm is a new media artist whose recent work involves the appropriation and alteration of commercial films, often reframing original narratives to explore the impact of contemporary technologies. In recent years, his work has been shown and exhibited at Plexus Projects (Brooklyn), Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), Gallery Madison Park (New York), Proto Gallery (Hoboken) and Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore). He is a graduate of Kenyon College and University of Oxford and lives in Columbus, OH. 

Sara Bonaventura is an Italian visual artist. As independent videographer she has been collaborating with performers and musicians, directing clips, adv, curating visuals in clubs. Her video works have been screened worldwide; at the Anthology Film Archives, NewFilmmakers NY series, for Other Cinema at San Francisco ATA Gallery, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Miami New Media festival, the LA Echo Park Film Center and more. She won the Veneto Region Award at the 10th Lago Film Fest in 2014 and a merit for the 2019 Sino per NIIO Illumination Art Prizes, with one of her work displayed in Hong Kong in one of the world’s biggest public screens; she has been selected for several residencies, ie in 2016 by Joan Jonas at Fundacion Botin (Spain). Recently selected for the ISEA 2019, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, in South Korea. She is currently working on her first documentary, Forest Hymn for Little Girls.

LAURA BOUZA is a Los Angeles based filmmaker whose work considers the intersections of documentary, narrative and experimental film traditions. Her films have screened internationally including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts and teaches film in the Cinema and Television Program at Fullerton College.

The Cindy Brandle Dance Company, officially formed in 2005, is under the Artistic Direction of Cindy Brandle. Influenced by human nature and events of the world unfolding around us, CBDC strives to create dances reflecting our times by engaging the audience with athletic, compassionate and vigorous choreography. CBDC’s goals are to create innovative and intimate work relevant to society and the world in which we inhabit, present dance at its highest quality and encourage our audience to experience modern dance with open and accepting eyes. Ms. Brandle and CBDC have been on a very specific trajectory and to this date have been following it successfully. Since 2004 Ms. Brandle and CBDC have created nine evening-length concerts to critical acclaim. It is the goal of the Artistic Director to continue to delve into evenings of work based on a singular theme and to take the audience through an emotional journey. Brandle was a grateful Artist-In-Residence at Hamlin Park through the Chicago Moving Company for 5 years. From April 1995 to August 2004 Brandle danced for CMC and served as Co-Artistic Director for the last five of those years. In 1999 and 2006 she received a fellowship for choreography from the Illinois Arts Council and has been awarded three CAAP grants from the City of Chicago. CBDC has also received funding from the Illinois Arts Council for their concert works, “In the Eye of Stillness”(2005) and “Searching for SuperGirl” (2009). Her work has been presented throughout Chicago, the Midwest, and Colorado and internationally in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Brazil. In November 2001 Brandle’s choreography was presented in the XXII INBA/UAM Choreographic Festival in Mexico City. Cindy Brandle is the Artistic Director of the Cindy Brandle Dance Company. CBDC incorporated in 2004, became a non-profit officially in 2005 in Chicago, and is now a Boulder, C0-based company. Cindy danced for ten years with the Chicago Moving Company and served as Co-Artistic Director with founder Nana Shineflug for five of those years. She has been awarded two scholarships from the Dance Center of Columbia College as both a performer and choreographer. In 1999 and 2006 Cindy received fellowships for choreography from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work has been presented at Dance Chicago, The Storefront Theatre, Harold Washington Library, The Dance Center of Columbia College, throughout Illinois, the Midwest and internationally in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Brazil. In November of 2001, Cindy’s dance “Duplicate” was presented in the XXII INBA/UAM Choreographic Festival in Mexico City. Her dances were produced in some of Chicago’s most exciting, experimental and exhilarating dance festivals, such as Chicago’s NEXT Dance Festival, Estrogen Fest, Spectrum Dance Festival and The Other Dance Festival. Since relocating to Boulder, Brandle’s work has been produced at the University of Colorado, Boulder department of Dance, The Denver Independent Choreographer’s Project and twice in the Boulder International Fringe Festival. Cindy lives with her beautiful family, Ashay, Akasha and Sami the Shih Tzu!

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand artist whose art practice includes the proposal and construction of large scale outdoor sculptures, discrete objects, installations as well as the creation of “impossible” moving and still images and architecture designed using computer 3D modelling, video editing and image editing programs. His work explores an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony. 

Jairo Cadena-Enríquez. Born Ecuador (1990). Documentary Filmmaker by Universidad del Cine of Buenos Aires – Argentina. Since 2015 he has participated on production of documentary short films in Argentina and Ecuador, where he is currently developing new audiovisual projects. In 2017 he founded LA CORDILLERA FILMS and produced his first feature as director and producer: “SOLDADITO”. His work has been part of some festivals around the world: Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, France, Colombia and Ecuador. 

Originally from Italy, Alessia Cecchet is maker of moving images. In her films she explores matters of loss and grief through the mix of different mediums; stop motion, fibers and live action film (both digital and analog). Alessia holds and MFA from Syracuse University as well as an MA in Film Studies from the University of Bologna (Italy) where she graduated with a thesis about the American animated cinema during WWII. Her thesis won the Future Film Festival award in 2013 and is now in the process of being published. Her thesis MFA thesis film Onikuma premiered in Italy during the 34th Torino Film Festival in the fall of 2016. Onikuma is an experimental narrative piece that follows the journey of two women through their memories and dreams using both live action film and stop motion animation. Alessia is currently pursuing a Phd in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her films have been shown in several countries such as the United States, Australia, Spain, Egypt, Italy, Republic of Kosovo, and the UK. 

Born in Taiwan, Wu-Ching Chang earned a BFA in New Media Art at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taipei in 2015. She is doing an MA in Experimental Animation at the Royal College of Art, UK in 2019. Wu-Ching has worked as a freelance artist for over 9 years. She has achieved projects in multiple fields, including illustration, comic serials, animation, DM design, etc. With the experience of working as a concept and cinematic artist in the game industry for years, she is now based in London, UK, available for international freelance and contract work.

Since 1981, Cecelia Condit has created videos and heroines whose lives swing between safety and terror, beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence.

Franklin Cruz is a queer latin poet born in Idaho, raised in Texas and polished in Denver. Born from an immigrant family he works at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as an educator performer, is an MC and dances. A Tedx Mile High performer he has taught and performed throughout the southwest, Peru, Puerto Rico for universities and environmental leadership camps and had poetry in the Denver Art Museum. His work encompasses self love, immigration, culture, nature and more.  Franklin always aims to address intersectional liberation, confronting our complicity to privilege and oppression and the pressing lesson of specificity over simplicity. (Instagram @fcruz_unido)

Ian D is a Pittsburgh, PA born poet and performer living in Denver, CO. He is an NPS Finalist (2004). He has been a member of the 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012 Mercury Cafe National Slam Teams. He was the alternate for the 2002 Merc team. He was a co-coach for the 2005, 2009, and 2011 Merc Teams and head coach in 2015. He has featured and competed at venues across the United States as well as having performed at Denmark’s Roskilde Music Festival in 2002 and the 2009 Connacht Regional Heat of the All-Ireland Slam in Galway. He has also achieved top 5 finishes at the Great Plains Poetry Pile-Up and Treetop Poetry Festival indie competitions. In addition to his slam credits, he has worked with students and writers at Front Range Community College, Red Rocks Community College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Denver South High School, 516arts (ABQ, NM), Oak Park/River Forest High (CHI, IL), as well as Art From Ashes. He has been published in Metrosphere, Poetry Victims, The  Pedestal Magazine, and The Denver Word Affiliate anthology Louder Than Clouds in addition to several Mercury Cafe Slam Team chapbooks. He is the author of two other chapbooks; Hymns For A Dancer (Verbl Warfare) and No Known Style: Poems from the Asylum (90 Proof, out of print) as well as, two CDs Suicide Mechanic and like wet cement (available for purchase). He has two live CDs forthcoming; Hometown Hero and Hymns Spoken Here. He is currently working on a full length poetry manuscript and at becoming a better human being. Oh yeah…and he’s one of the co-founders of the Mercury Cafe Poetry Slam.

Lisa Danker is an experimental and documentary filmmaker, who primarily works with Super 8 and 16mm film. Her films explore the intersections of place, history, and identity and have screened in venues around the world. She is currently an assistant professor in film at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she teaches courses in experimental cinema, film theory, and film and video production.

Ilaria Di Carlo is a visual artist working in the fields of experimental film, video art and performance. She graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and from the prestigious Central Saint Martin’s in London. She subsequently studied Film at the SAE Institute of Berlin. Her films have been screened and awarded internationally. She lives and works in Berlin.

Marta Di Francesco is a London based artist, exploring new aesthetics, merging poetics with code. She investigates digital identity and its fragmentation, exploring and questioning it through digital bleed, time displacement, video processing, and the sculptural quality of time in volumetric aesthetics. Through her practice she is preoccupied with the right to time and time consciousness as a form of resistance, in times of distraction. She merges a conceptual, critical approach with a search for metaphysical correspondences between the self and the metaverse, writing and creating radical visual pieces which inhabit and cross over poetry, dance and code, and working through multidisciplinary collaborations to explore new expressions and conversations.

Alberto Jose Doctorovich. Birth 25-May-1962-Buenos Aires-Argentina. Cinematographer specialist in time lapse. Participating in many documentary projects. As well as advertising campaigns, and series. An Artistic photography and a great impact images in altered time are his seal.

Katalin Egely. “I graduated in Animation in 2013 from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary. Besides short films, credits and animated scenes for movies my focus is primarily on making music videos. Music videos are especially inspiring for me because instead of narrative story-telling I can create visual poetry based on associative images. I also like to work on animated documentary films because with animation it’s possible to express the more subjective parts of a narrative.” – KE

Lisa Engelken is a dancer, choreographer and producer from Denver. She has performed with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Visaversa Dance Buenos Aires, Gesel Mason’s No Boundaries and Rennie Harris Grassroots Project. She has also performed and trained with Alonzo King LINES summer program and the American Dance Festival. She holds a degree in Social Action Through the Arts from Metropolitan State University of Denver. Lisa has taught at Hudson Valley Conservatory, Peridance Center in NYC. Currently she is faculty to the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Denver School of the Arts and The BBoy Factory. Her work has been shown at San Francisco International Hip Hop Festival, Versa Style Festival LA and Breakin’ Convention Denver. She holds battle titles from Disciples of Funk House & Free Style Crew categories, Stackin’ Stylez 1v1 and Fight Club 1v1. Lisa is a Cultural Ambassador for the US State Department in Hip Hop Diplomacy. She is also the  founder and producer of the Hip Hop theatre show Breaking Barriers and the Crossover Project art program, educating performance through poetry and dance which premiered in Lima, Peru in 2017. 

Jeffrey Erlacher is a poet and children’s author from Denver, CO. His poetry has appeared in Midwest Review, Brushfire, Talking Writing and elsewhere. He also has a children’s novel, The Little Palace, which is being released by Chipper Press on October 8th. Find out more about his work at jeffreyerlacher.com and Instagram @jeffreyerlacher. Jeffrey’s poetry explores our shared multi-layered realities, from the structures of the molecular and musical, to the grounded specificity of geographic place, body, and identity—while reaching to and through the shifting and expanding universe (or multiverse) we inhabit and are inhabited by. He writes for those he loves and the passions that move him, including music and art, our relationship to one another, travel and time, disability and illness and death—but also possibility and wholeness and this one-time life that unfurls in the present moment. 

Erin Espelie‘s films have shown at the NYFF, the British Film Institute, CPH:DOX, the Full Frame Film Festival, and more. She co-directs NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado – Boulder. 

Anna Estelles. Director, Actress and Movement Researcher, Visual Artist. Founder & Director of Akar Studio & Akar Dance Theatre. “I have worked in films, TV and theater, also as choreographer, art director. Seven years ago I moved to Indonesia to study Traditional Dance and I decided to establish my company in Java. I got involved in traditional art & culture, looking for new movement languages and other inspiration sources. Nowadays, I’m focused on collaborating with different artists and disciplines, getting deep in my own style as scene director, visual artist , video artist and movement researcher. I currently live between Spain and Indonesia.” – AE

Siavash Eydani. 1985 Born, Shiraz – Iran. 2017 BA Visual Communication. 2019 MA photography. “When I was 17, faced to photography with a Zenit SLR Camera. And One year After that, I set up my own darkroom to do photography in serious ways. Interesting to variety of Culture and Roots of History , made a reason for me to travel around Iran to do photography and make movie with this concept. Most of these travels are with bicycle and hiking. A kind of documentary that shows relations between human, history and environment is my ideal. My works maybe is a rope between photography and cinema.” – SE

Mélissa Faivre, born 1989 in France, is an experimental video artist based in Berlin. Her contemplative and mesmerising work seeks to provoke questions on the nature of perception. By experimenting with editing techniques, she creates images that present blended and distorted realities that seek to test the temporal and spatial co-ordinates foundational to the perceptive experience.

Fitzgerald. Filmmaker, visual artist and educator based in Denver, Colorado. His work consists of digital collage and films that explore conceptions about blackness, masculinity, identity as performance and representation. His work is specifically aimed at humanizing and de-commodifying the black body through moving images. His work has shown in the Color of Conversation Film Festival in Denver, Colorado, and the Chale Wote Street Arts Festival in Ghana, Africa.

Scott Fitzpatrick. is a visual artist (Libra) from Winnipeg whose film and video work has screened at underground festivals and marginalized venues worldwide. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at the University of Manitoba and began conducting lo-fi moving image experiments in 2010. His work has received prizes from the WNDX Festival of Moving Image, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, FLEX Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and in 2018 he was the recipient of the 2018 Winnipeg Film Group Manitoba Film Hothouse Award. In addition to producing his own work, SF presents the work of others currently through the WNDX Festival of Moving Image, and formerly as the co-founder of the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival and Open City Cinema. SF has also curated work for the Gimli Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art, Forthwith Festival, Send + Receive, San Diego Underground Film Festival, MIRE International Film Labs Meeting, and the PRISME Festival. 

Thorsten Fleisch, born 1972 in Koblenz/Germany. First film experiments with his dad’s super 8 camera when still in school. Studied experimental film with Peter Kubelka at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Germany. His films received several awards and are shown at festivals worldwide like: New York Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam. He lives and works in Berlin where he is also involved in theatre projects, creating video games and musical excesses with his band Malende.

Michael Fleming is an Amsterdam based visual artist. In essence his work appropriates iconic cultural images, altering them to highlight underlying issues. His ‘moving paintings’ are primarily made out of found footage, using feature films, advertising and pop-cultural scenes completed into a mesmerising montage of images. Flemings work has been featured in exhibitions and film festivals internationally.

A native of Dallas, Texas, Attiyya Fortune began her training at Dallas Black Dance Theatre and was a member of the Allegro Ensemble for four seasons. She is currently a senior BFA candidate in Dance and a Business minor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Attiyya is a member of Nu-World Contemporary Danse Theatre and an apprentice of Interweave Dance Theatre. She has had the privilege to perform several works by many esteemed artists in the Dallas and Denver-Boulder communities. 

Ahja Fox (aefoxx) can be found around Denver, Colorado reading at various events, cheering on her community, or co-hosting Art of Storytelling. She is an assistant poetry editor for Copper Nickel and Homology Lit and publishes in online and print journals like Five:2:One, LEVELER, Driftwood Press, Rigorous, Okay Donkey, The Perch (Yale), and more. She has also been included in the 2018 Punch Drunk Anthology, YANYR Anthology, and Reclaim: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry. Ahja’s poems and prose are manifested through extreme recurrence of body-centric imagery and paronomasia which reflect her tag ‘Suicide by writing’. It’s her way of saying that the death and autopsy of themes and concepts is the key to understanding the truth about them. 

Julian Gallese. Animation filmmaker from San José, Costa Rica. His work has been shown in film festivals and galleries around the world. In 2018, Julian completed an artist residency at the Toronto Animated Image Society and he’s currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

Adriana López Garibay, graduated from the Master of “Cine Alternativo” 2018 in Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV), Cuba. Her first documentary short as director in “Blindness in the City” was part of the official selection of “Festival Internacional de Cine con Medios Alternativos” 2016. “Muerte al Dogma” is a video dance directed by her and that has been shown in the 23rd Festival Internacional de danza en paisajes Urbanos and in the Department of Film & Media arts / The University of Utah by Szepreling curated collection. Her short film as director in “Metamorfosis” was part of Vanguard section of “Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano” 2018, Jean Genet’s Eternal Smile (6) – Designed Reminiscence Vol.2 and Pleasure Dome. Some of her short films have been screened at Festival Festival Internacional de la Imagen (FINI), Hazel Eye Film Festival, Enegrama Festival of experimental film and 3o Festival de Videopoesía UNGS.

Amir George is a filmmaker and curator who creates spiritual stories, juxtaposing sound and image with a non-linear perception. He creates fragmented vignettes that conjure the secret life of objects both found and collected. The characters that inhabit his stories tend to dwell outside of social norms and exist in the space between and in the process of becoming. Following up from his Better Made Progress collection of work presented in Denver in September 2017.

Adrian Garcia Gomez is an interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, photography and illustration.  His artwork, which is largely autobiographical and often performative, explores the intersections of race, immigration, gender, spirituality and sexuality. His short experimental films, photographs and drawings have been exhibited around the world.  He currently lives and works in Geneva.

Britany Gunderson is pursuing a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her practice is often interdisciplinary, creating film and video work that uses material forms such as hand-cut paper, textile fabrics, and celluloid. Exploring ideas of personal non-fiction, her work expands the idea of what a moving image can be. She has screened at venues internationally and received Honorable Mention at the 2018 Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. 

Sam Gurry is a filmmaker living and working in Hollywood. They are a recent graduate from the MFA Experimental Animation program at the California Institute of the Arts. Sam’s films have played internationally at SXSW, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and others. In addition to animation, They perform experimental noise music in the performance group Saint Victoria’s Incorruptible Body, organize events around LA, and write. Sam is chronically over eager.

Rachel Halmrast began dancing at eXit SPACE School of Dance in Seattle, WA.  Under the artistic direction of Marlo Ariz and Karen Baskett, she deepened her study of movement and choreography as a member of the pre-professional program. After graduating high school, she spent a year dancing for Seattle-based artists Amy J Lambert (AJnC), Alicia Mullikin, and Marlo Ariz (Marlo Ariz Dance Project). She is pursuing majors in both Dance and Jewish Studies at CU Boulder, and is currently exploring conscious movement as a means of investigating and expressing the human experience.

Keith Haynes, a Houston native, is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and video projection designer who recently received his MFA in Dance, with an emphasis in video technology, from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Haynes began his dance training in 2012 while pursuing his BFA in Radio/Television at Stephen F. Austin State University under the direction of Heather Samuelson and Katie Parr. As an interdisciplinary artist, Haynes fuses contemporary modern dance and video projection to investigate and explore identity, race, and his Christian faith. Haynes’s research emerges from investigations with reference to notions of how identities collide and coincide within one body. His work aims to undo the recurring patterns of normalcy and compliance imposed upon people of color and uncover the misconnections between identities that lead to self-regulation, perpetuated by internal and external forces deemed socially tolerable. Recently, Haynes has worked and trained with Heather Samuelson, Gesel Mason, Larry Southall, Chris and Bashir Page-Sanders and Helanius J. Wilkins. Additionally, Haynes has performed in works at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and the American College Dance Association Gala concerts in Eugene, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado. Currently, Haynes is working on multiple projects throughout the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area that include video projection design and dance curation for The Unseen Festival.

André Hoilette is a Jamaican born poet who lives in Denver. His Great Uncle has a black belt in roots magic. Hoilette is a Cave Canem fellow who spends a lot of his physic energy avoiding duppies when they can be avoided. He writes about the dead reads comics and loves music. After 15 years away from writing, he has returned to pursue MFAs in Poetry and Fiction from Regis University. “I generally write about the Caribbean, it’s lore or about the dead. The manuscript I’m currently working on is about loss interpreted through cellists and the instrument.”

Maxime Hot. Enthusiastic moviegoer, He’s interested in experimental, arthouse, bis, documentary and underground cinemas. He studied cinema at the University of Lyon (France) and wrote about scientific photography of the 19th century and experimental movies. At the same time he organized several screenings (hallucinogenic cinema, movies-concert…). He’s involved in several festival (Les Inattendus) and collectives (Les Enthousiastes, Météorites). He makes short experimental videos (especially from chosen footage) since 2016.

A Tucson, Arizona local, Hattie Houser began their dancing career at Encore Dance Academy. They are currently a senior pursuing their BFA Dance and Geography degrees at the University of Colorado Boulder. Hattie has been training in contemporary, modern, ballet, and other forms. Hattie has worked with esteemed artists in the Tucson and Denver-Boulder community and hopes to continue collaborating with artists in the future.

Rakel Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic film maker and visual artist, born in 1980. She has a degree in visual arts from the Icelandic Art Academy with main focus on video installations. She has taken part in various exhibitions and festivals in Iceland and internationally e.g. Sequences Art Festival, Northern Wave Film Festival International Kurzfilmwoche Regensburg, Austrian Filmfestival and Backup festival Weimar. She is currently working on her second short film.

Ong Sau Kai, video editor, freelancer,  Malaysia.

Eginhartz Kanter (AT/DE) works with film, video and photography, mainly in the context of public space. In his artistic approach he questions the boundaries and conventions of everyday life and living environments. His (sub)urban interventions negotiate aspects of the public and often have a direct relation to architecture. He participates in international exhibitions and showed his artworks in Gallery 5020 Salzburg, Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery Moscow, S.Y.P. Artspace Tokyo and the 18^thWroclaw Media Art Biennale. 

M. Kardinal is a visual artist currently based in Berlin (DE). Her work has been exhibited and screened in national and international exhibitions and film screenings including 14th Montreal Underground Film Festival (CA, 2019), Revolutions per Minute Film Festival (USA, 2019), Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival (ES, 2018), Another Experiment by Woman Film Festival (USA, 2018), L’Ososphère (FR, 2017), Wellington Underground Film Festival (NZ, 2016), Festival Alto Vicentino (IT, 2014), SI FEST#OFF (IT, 2013), International Short Film Festival Detmold (DE, 2013), Another Experiment by Woman Film Festival (USA, 2013).

Grzegorz Kielawski, MA, b. 1981 in Wa?brzych, Poland. Studied German Philology in Wa?brzych and Vienna. Member of the Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung; works for zeitzoo, the Secession and WIDOK.

Originally from Nebraska, Vivian Kim is a choreographer, teaching artist, and performer based in Boulder, CO.  She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Nebraska Lincoln under the direction of Susan Levine-Orada.  During her time at UNL, Vivian had the opportunity to work with, and perform for, Kayvon Pourazar, Kendra Portier (David Dorfman Dance), Jenna Reigel (Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company), STREB: POP Action Company, Ekida Laurie, Noelle Bohaty, and many others.  After graduating from UNL in 2014, Vivian performed and taught for MamLuft&Company Dance in Cincinnati, OH under the Artistic Direction of Jeanne Mam-Luft. While in Cincinnati, Vivian also had the opportunity to present a commissioned work for the Cincinnati Area Choreographer’s Festival.  Recently, Vivian received her Master of Fine Arts degree for Performance and Choreography in Dance with a secondary emphasis in The Alexander Technique from CU Boulder May of 2018. During her time at CU Boulder, she had the opportunity to teach as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor, lecture and study under Helanius J. Wilkins, Gesel Mason, Erika Randall, Larry Southall, and many others.  Currently, Vivian is teaching at Red Rocks Community College as an Adjunct Professor in Hip Hop. She is also a company member for world-renowned Hip-Hop choreographer and dancer, Rennie Harris, in his Denver-based dance company, Rennie Harris Grass Roots Project. Vivian’s performance research is based around her Korean-American identity and the balance between imposed Korean traditionalism and being raised in the U.S.  She’s interested in the U.S. influences on South Korean media, culture, and expectations of women.  In this research, Vivian’s curiosities lie within in the collision, or intersection, of these two cultures and how they influence her actions, behavior, character, and thought-process. Vivian’s very excited to be a part of the Unseen Festival this year and looks forward to sharing the space with other brilliant artists.

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born multimedia artist. Her work spans multiple disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and video. Her moving image work has screened at festivals internationally at Crossroads Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Antimatter, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Haverhill Experimental Film Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota among others. Anna’s work also screens in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements, and school houses! She is also painter, printmaker, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings. She currently lives and works in Sharjah. 

annakipervaser.com

Julio Lamaña.- (Barcelona – Catalonia). President of the Catalan Federation of Cineclubs (FCC) from May 2003 to September 2006. He is also the Secretary General of the International Federation of Cineclubs. Within the international sphere, he is the promoter in the South of Europe of the alternative distributor CINESUD, which promotes alternative cinema to all film societies on the planet. Founding partner of the cinema club BEC (Barcelona Espai de Cinema) that organizes its activities in the city of Barcelona. Professor of film history.

Péter Lichter is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker. He studied film history and film theory at the ELTE University, Budapest. Péter makes found footage abstract films, lyrical documentaries and experimental features since 2002. His films were screened at festivals and venues like: Berlinale Critics’ Week; Tribeca Film Festival – New York; Rotterdam IFF; Jihlava IDFF; goEast – Wiesbaden; EXiS – Seoul; CROSSROADS – San Francisco; VideoEX – Zurich; Festival of (In)appropriation – Los Angeles; Antimatter – Victoria, Canada; etc. He is also one of the editors of the Prizma film-periodical, his first book on experimental cinema (A láthatatlan birodalom / The Invisible Impire) was published in 2016, his second and third book were published in 2018.

Isaac Linder is a Denver-based DJ originally from Washington, DC. Having completed their BA work on sound reproduction technology in the work of Samuel Beckett at Naropa University, they are a student in Media Philosophy at The European Graduate School, serve as intermittent editor at the journal of philosophy, biopolitics, and art, Continent. (at continentcontinent.cc), and are always listening. Speaking to the acousmatic nature of the unseen, Isaac will be presenting a selection from “PEDAGOGICAL TRAX”, a recently completed collection of pata-philological translations of work by the contemporary French musique concreté composer Lionel Marchetti.

Emma Arlington M. specializes in cross-genre hybridities. As a vocal advocate for challenging the boxes creative artists are put in, she pushes boundaries by refusing to adhere to traditionality of genre, language or the confines of the page within her work. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, with a focus on poetry and memoir, from Goddard College. Her writing can be found in print in The Pitkin Review and The Champagne Room Journal. Emma Arlington M. writes most often about bodies; their intricacies, intimacies, and intersections. Her current project, [the curation of a body], is a hyrbid work which uses poetry, photography, and prose to create a memoir-esque journey of a body searching for its footing as mental illness takes root. The narrator navigates her way through time and space, from birth to young adulthood, to discover that acceptance is a lifetime project where she is constantly re-finding her way back into her own body and mind. 

Nelson MacDonald is an emerging filmmaker from Nova Scotia, Canada. He is best known for producing the 2016 feature film Werewolf by longtime collaborator Ashley McKenzie. Werewolf premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, screened at Berlinale in the celebrated Forum Section, and won top prize at Festival du nouveau cinema in Montreal. The 2017 short film There Lived the Colliers is Nelson’s first as director. It premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and has screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Festival du nouveau cinema in Montreal and Open City Documentary Festival in London.

Meg Madorin is a performing artist, arts educator and choreographer. She was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2012-2014, and has danced with Elena Demyanenko, Christopher Williams, Gerald Casel, Alexandra Beller, Tara O’Con, and Kendra Portier, among others. Meg has been artist-in-residence at the Dance Initiative in Carbondale, CO, and co-produces CLOSE LOOK; a performance series which curates solo artists for one evening within the close quarters of FloorSpace Studio in Boulder, CO. She is also a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, practicing both bodywork and verbal techniques for trauma therapy and holistic health, and is particularly passionate about working with new parents and babies. Prior to becoming an MFA Candidate in Dance at University of Colorado, Boulder, she received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Performance from the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance in Austria.

Laura Malpass is a ballet and contemporary dance teaching artist, dancer, and choreographer, interested in the ways dance can transcend all boundaries we perceive or feebly construct, empowering individuals and transforming communities for the better. After graduating with a major in Psychology and minors in Dance in French from Hope College, she toured California and the southwestern states with contemporary company Moving Arts and danced with Coco et Compagnie in the SF Bay Area. Teaching is her passion, and she has taught dance courses and as a guest artist in public schools, retirement communities, dance studios, community centers, and universities. This past May, Laura completed her MFA in Dance at CU Boulder, with a secondary emphasis in Somatics and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies. She creates dance work rooted in story and identity to unpack how our physical bodies hold the memory of our emotional, relational, and experiential lives

rick h m is a QTPOC, anti-disciplinary artist based in Boulder, CO. They are a current MFA (Choreography) candidate at University of Colorado Boulder, and a Graduate Part-Time Instructor in the Theatre & Dance Department. rick received their BA (Dance & Sociology) from Wesleyan University, concentrating in performance studies and choreography as a means of ascribing a creative process rooted in imagining queer utopia(s). Their scholarly research on queer utopia has further led to community building via various artistic/life pursuits, including their performing under the stage name, umami goddess™. rick’s current research interests include emerging technologies (AI/machine-learning), absurdism/comedy, decolonizing studies, Asian-diasporic studies, queer theory, and how dance might constantly be reimagined towards hybrid art practices representative of hybrid lived experiences. rick has worked with and studied beneath noted dance makers/scholars including Michelle Ellsworth, Rennie Harris, Darrell Jones, Katja Kolcio, Bebe Miller, Eiko Otake, Erika Randall, and Nicole Stanton. Through written and embodied forms of creative research, rick calls for a dismantling of the systems that enforce control over our abilities to liberate our social bodies.

Guillaume Marin has been a director and editor for fifteen years. He created visuals for different media platforms, commercials, music videos and experimental films. A great dreamer joker. Playing with illusions and perceptions is his favorite sport.

Marin Martinie is a french cartoonist and animation director, graduated from EnsAD Paris. He’s interested in deconstructing classical forms of art in the fields of comics and animation. He lives and works in Paris.

Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker and multimedia artist originally from the city of Guayaquil. His works oscillate between modalities of hybrid cinemas using methodologies that experiment with archival materials, celluloid film, analog tape, digital media, synesthetic operations, personal mythologies and travelogues, in bifurcations that stand out among the ramifications of the aforementioned. His work has been exhibited at the Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador Ulises Estrella, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and festivals that include FIDMarseille, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Les Inattendus film festival (très) indépendants, ULTRACinema Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, among others, as well as galleries and clandestine DIY screenings. He is also co-founder of EVIDENCE, a micro-publishing project that releases radical poetry, visual arts, photography, and also para-essayistic works within the world of avant-garde cinema. 

Ross Meckfessel is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in Super 8 and 16mm film. His films often emphasize materiality and poetic structures while depicting the condition of modern life through apocalyptic obsession, contemporary ennui, and the technological landscape. His work has screened internationally and throughout the United States including in Projections at the New York Film Festival, Wavelengths at Toronto International Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Internationales Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Antimatter [Media Art], Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, and The Artifact Small Format Film Festival where he was awarded best 16mm film.

Ashok Meena is an independent cinematographer based out of Mumbai. He is known for his cinematography for Kamal Swaroop’s acclaimed documentary Pushkar Puran. His recent work includes a feature film Versova shot entirely on B/W super16. He is also working on his first feature documentary Kunchok which will be his directorial debut.

Toni Mitjanit was born in Manacor (Spain) in 1977. Lives and Works in Spain. Is Bachelor in Computer Science in 2002 by Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), Ph-Degree in Computer Graphics on Internet in 2002 by FUEIB, Master in Multimedia Production & Creation in 2007 by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Degree in Photography in 2010 by Escola Superior de Disseny de Palma (ESD). Works at the level of media, video art, computational art, generative design and experimental animation regularly since 2010.He explores innovative audiovisual expressive ways through creative coding using data visualization, human/machine interaction, autonomous agents, physics and randomness. All his audiovisual creations are produced by coding his own software in different programming languages (Processing, Java, C++, SuperCollider, ChucK)

Evan Morgan is a filmmaker and musician from Houston, TX currently living in Durham, NC. His continued interest in the overlap between avant-garde forms of the moving image and music often informs his work in both fields. His film work has shown at festivals as close as Chapel Hill, NC and as far away as Riga, Latvia. Morgan currently performs with fiddler Courtney Werner in the experimental, old-time duo Magic Tuber Stringband. They have shared bills with artists such as Tom Carter, Isasa, Eight Point Star, the Cherry Blossoms and Powers/Rolin Duo. They’re debut record Wayward Airs for Earthbound Vagrants released at the beginning of August 2019. 

Dakota Nanton is an experimental animator based out of Boulder, Colorado. His artwork and films draw inspiration from such diverse areas as comic books, folklore, science fiction, religious imagery and art history. Borrowing from the images and iconographies of the past, and mixing old techniques with new, he explores the complexities and contradictions of living in the modern world. His work has been exhibited all around the world and is held in permanent collections in the United States, Canada, Italy, Australia, Egypt and New Zealand.

Rick Niebe. MA in semiotic of Cinema at Pisa University, he works as an autonomous artist. His research as videomaker consists in a minimal and epigrammatic experimental re-use of audio visual found objects. Interested in a critical ‘detournement’ of rough materials from the “mediascape” he focuses his attention on ordinary anonymous images as well as on fragments from cinematographic history. His work of de-construction of narrative devices, and re-contextualization of visual elements, aims to disorient and estrange the viewer playing a game between memory and formation of new meanings.

Isabelle Nouzha graduated from LUCA School of Arts Brussels, Belgium. She directs films where a world of childhood and horror coexist.Violent elements often dictate her scenarios like breaking points, traces of historical violence, and marginalized social groups

Nu World Contemporary Dance

Timothy David Orme is a writer, filmmaker, and animator. His short films have won international awards and shown at film festivals all over the world including Big Muddy, European Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor, and many others.

Iwona Pasinska is a choreographer, movement dramatist, theatre theorist, artistic director of Movements Factory and co-founder of the Movements Factory Foundation. She graduated from the F. Parnell Ballet School in ?ód?. In 1997 Pasi?ska became the principal dancer of the Polish Dance Theatre (PTT) – Pozna? Ballet. Since 2010 she has been collaborating as choreographer or movement dramaturge with dramatic theatres, operas and alternative theatres. She holds a degree in theatre theory from the A.Mickiewicz University in Pozna?, where she also did her PhD, focusing on the experience of the body in contemporary theatre from the perspective of dance theatre. In 2016 she has become the Director of the Polish Dance Theatre.

Simon Payne has been making abstract cinematic works for twenty years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms and highly structured, single-frame sequences that produce unexpected colour combinations, clashing planes and counter-intuitive illusions of movement. Simon’s work has shown in numerous international film festivals and galleries including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam film festivals; Tate Britain and Tate Modern and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. He has written widely on experimental cinema and is currently editing a posthumous book by A.L. Rees, entitled Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship. Simon is Reader in Film and Media at ARU, Cambridge, UK.

Blas Payri is a sound artist and a video/screendance artist. He is professor of sound design, film music, video art and music perception at the audiovisual communication department of Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. 

Ricardo Perea. (Bogotá – Colombia) .- 25 years of work in the field of community communication, audiovisual production and photography for social change in Colombia. His work has focused on making visible proposals for alternative development of indigenous, peasant and Afro-descendant communities, based on the recognition of cultural identity and traditional forms of production that guarantee food sovereignty, fair trade, gender equity, sense of belonging over the territory, environmental sustainability and economic autonomy.

Mikey Peterson’s meditative images merge with dissolves and jolts via extended real-time shots and jump cuts. Light contrasts through darkened backgrounds, and classical elements—water, fire, air and earth—create abstracted spaces. These distortions, equally influenced by pre-CGI science fiction films, experimental cinema, and sound collage aim to disturb the viewer’s self-perception and sense of place. Subtle events appear dramatic and nature’s movements become surreal transformations as they reside within the boundary between the physical and the virtual. Footage is manipulated and taken out of its original context in order to relay other truths about the world that it is from – unveiling themes of memory, evolution, destruction, disorientation, and fear. To advance this process of displacement, Peterson manipulates the ambient sound from the source recordings to compose a cohesive soundtrack, moving the viewer into dream-like meditations, chaos, and dark surreal spaces that paradoxically envelop rhythms of tone and light.

Ugo Petronin (b1985, FR) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Rotterdam. His current research focuses on the question of continuity in photographic and cinematographic processes. His latest work Abiding (2019) is a film made of a single 35mm photograph taken in a shutterless camera.

Nicola Pilkington is a theatre-maker, filmmaker, installation artist and educator. Her original work includes short experimental documentary, Double Negative; the dance video and performance installation Rebirth of IQHAWE, and a one-woman show, Tracks. Her most notable participation in film projects include working with award-winning production companies, Urucu Media and Yellowbone Entertainment, on Inxeba (2017) and Sew the Winter to my Skin (2018) and Knuckle City (2019), respectively. And she directed NTC’s 2016 production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus which toured to over 120 schools around South Africa (including Swaziland), reaching up to 9,500 learners.

Emma Piper-Burket is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer using fiction, non-fiction, and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society, and the human spirit. Her work is process-based and research driven, incorporating social trends, ancient history, science, politics, ephemera, and the natural world into her creative practice. Emma has received support from Light Cone, Visual Studies Workshop, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sundance, Marble House Project, among others for her creative works. Her short films have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including screenings at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Anthology Film Archives, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, ULTRACinema MX, and Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. She holds an MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague, and a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies from Georgetown University.

Born in France in 1982, Emmanuel Piton works as a film director and professor. His personal creations are between experimental cinema and documentary. His films are made in super 8 and 16mm films. He teaches at Rennes University in cinema section. He founded Labo K, an experimental laboratory dedicated to the practice of film cinema.

Ihor Podolchak. Born 1962 in Lviv, Ukraine. Graduated with distinction from the Lviv Academy of Fine Arts, 1984. Filmmaker, artist, creator of extensive projects in the field of visual art, laureate at 25 international art exhibitions in Canada, the United States, South Korea, Latvia, Poland, Norway, Spain, and Ukraine. Among 24 personal exhibitions, one bears the distinction of being the first art exhibit ever to be held in space, aboard the Space Station Mir, in 1993. The artwork of Ihor Podolchak is housed in 26 museums and public collections worldwide.

Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum work together as artist-couple under the name PolakVanBekkum. Their work focuses on landscape and mobility. Rooted in the history of Dutch realistic landscape depiction, they embrace new technologies to express personal experiences of spaces of the contemporary city and countryside. Their projects are often informed by collaborations with participants, be it humans, objects, or even the rays of the sun.

Stuart Pound lives in London and has worked in film, digital video, sound and the visual arts since the early 1970’s. Since 1995 he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman. Video work has been screened regularly in London and at international festivals.

Oliver Poppert. Emerging video artist, working primarily in digital video and photography. My work focuses on concepts of time and space – abstract representations of spaces and people with particular interest in urban environments and how they are inhabited.

Diego Porral (Madrid, Spain, 1992). He’s currently studying Animation at Gobelins (Paris, France). Monsters Walking is his third short film as a director and animator. His previous short film, “A day in the park” (original title: “Un día en el parque”) was nominated to the Goya Award to Best Animated Short Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Spain and reached more than 100 international selections and 20 awards.

Victor Orozco Ramirez. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Hamburg Germany with a master’s degree in Fine Arts in the area of documentary filmmaking. He also organized in Ecuador, Germany and Mexico until 2012 the short film festival ambulart.

Emma Rautala is a former student from Turku Art Academy (Turku University of Applied Sciences). She is specialized in animation, directing and storytelling. Her previous films are UGLIBOI (2017), co-directed Rathole Diner (2018) and most recent one Naamajainen (eng. Masquerade, 2019). She likes to tell her stories in a dark but cute way. She also likes to pet dogs.

Matthew Ripplinger is an emerging experimental filmmaker based in Regina Saskatchewan, Canada. His interests focus on black and white 16mm and 8mm film, hand processing, contact printing, optical printing and home made emulsion. He is also a photographer and printmaker that he uses to explore experimental practices in surface based mediums and combining his love of film and print art.

Julie Rothschild. Dancer, Choreographer, Alexander Technique Teacher and Movement Educator. Currently dances and creates with Chicken Bank Collective, a performance collective of women from Mexico and the U.S., creates solo projects in collaboration with visual artists and composers, owns and operates FloorSpace Studio in Boulder, CO, and co-curates CLOSE LOOK, a solo performance series, with Meg Madorin. www.julierothschildmovement.com

Daniel Rowe was born and raised in South Portland, Maine. He started making animated films as one of the many self-taught kids of the first Flash boom in the early 00’s. Now Daniel is a Boston-based independent animator working in both traditional and digital techniques. He received his MFA from VCU’s Kinetic Imaging Department in 2013, and his BFA in Animation from MassArt in 2007. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Hiroya Sakurai. Born in Yokohama,Japan. Professor, Seian University of Art and Design. Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J.Paul Getty Trust. Sakurai was awarded at “35th Asolo Art Film Festival (2016)”, Italy, “39th Tokyo Video Festival”, 18th FILE 2017 in São Paulo (2017) and 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2018).

Maki Sataki. Born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1980. Lives in Sapporo, Japan. Graduated from The Hokkaido University of Education, Sapporo. Chiefly, making animation that uses the photograph. I’m searching for the world in the interstice of the record and the memories. In 2011, Invited screening in Paris by French distribution group CINEDOC PARIS FILMS COOP. In 2016, a workshop lecturer for photography animation at the Dresden International Short Film Festival. In 2018, a Jury member of The 2 Minutes Short Film Award at 31.Stuttgarter Filmwinter.

Murat Sayginer is a self-taught artist who works in the fields of photography and digital art, and is also known as a filmmaker and composer. Born in Prague in 1989, Murat Sayg?ner studied in Paris during his childhood and graduated from Lycee Charles De Gaulle high school in Ankara. He got involved with photography in 2007 and won several international awards. In 2008, his works were selected for ”IPA BEST OF SHOW” exhibition in New York. In 2010 he was awarded Emerging Talent of the Year in the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards. He has written, directed and produced several animated short films since 2013. His films were screened in over 150 film festivals and 6 of them were staff picked on Vimeo. He is currently living and working as a freelancer in Ankara.

Vera Sebert, Media Artist. Artistic works in the border areas of visual media, language, film, computer programs: Computer code allows the adaptation of all other media whose properties are imitated, fragmented and reassembled in virtual space. The hybrid exposes the categorical separation between artistic image and text production and creates a space for experiments that explore the mesh of code, image, sound and language in a digital environment. How does the user interface determine our idea of the interrelationship between body, language and machine.

Robert Seidel’s projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals, as well as at galleries and museums such as the ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Center Nabi Seoul and MOCA Taipei. He is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science. By the organic interplay of structural, spatial and temporal concepts he creates an evolving complexity of multifaceted readings. Seidel lives in Berlin/Jena as artist and curator.

Arthur B. Senra is Brazilian. He studied Film and Video and has a specialization in Creative Processes in Words and Image. He is a director of short films, music videos, professor of audiovisual workshops, and also collaborated on several film projects. His works have been featured in national and international festivals, receiving several awards. He worked as assistant director of the MUMIA – Underground World Animation Festival from 2006 to 2015. From 2016 to 2018 he was curator and programmer of the Sesc Palladium movie theater in Belo Horizonte. Currently lives in Brasilia and works as curator and programmer of film festivals.

Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

Lynne Siefert is a filmmaker originally from Seattle, WA. Shooting both on 16mm film and digitally Lynne creates experimental documentaries and short poetic world-scapes.  Lynne has exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals such as Edinburgh International Film Festival, EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival, Antimatter Media Art, and Chicago Underground, among others. She is currently living nomadically in the United States. 

Oliver Smith is a visual artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from the Ringling School of Art and Georgia State University. Using the interplay between sound and moving image to create intense states of being is of special interest. When not making art he can often be found wandering around on a bicycle.

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Laurids Andersen Sonne is a Danish interdisciplinary artist. Laurids’ work spans film, video, installation, sculpture, performance and socially engaged art. From 2004 to 2014, Laurids was a member of the four-person art collective Parfyme, focusing on participatory and social based processes; developing new platforms for community, interaction and exploration. Laurids sees art as a tool that can be used for many things: as a catalyst for personal reflection on being or ameliorations on our surroundings, a way to explore, entwine and unfold serious topics. Laurids holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Lund University, Sweden and an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

A Maine girl at heart, Kate Speer is a dancer, choreographer, and organizer based in Denver, CO. Speer has had residencies at RedLine (CO), PlatteForum (CO), Middlebury College (VT), Swarthmore College (PA), and Mascher Space Cooperative (PA), all of which emphasize community engagement that is inherent in her dancemaking. Often self-producing in DIY spaces, her own choreography has been supported by National Performance Network, Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement Grant, the Puffin Foundation and the Community Education Center’s New Edge Artist Mix Series (PA), and has been presented at Performatica (Cholula, Mexico), Boulder International Fringe Festival (CO), Philly Fringe (PA), ETC Performance Series (PA), and FAB Dance Showcase (ME). In 2018, Speer was selected for Control Group Productions’ inaugural Guest Artist Presenting Initiative, which produced [Colony 933], an immersive mystery dance-theatre, directed by Speer and conceived of and created collectively with 20 different artists in visual, performance, and music. Always seeking collaborative performance projects, she has had the pleasure to perform in work by Gesel Mason Performance Projects, Claudia Lavista, Ondine Geary, Raja Feather Kelly, Tania Isaac, Patrick Mueller, and Willi Dorner. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Colorado Boulder and a BA in Dance and Biology from Swarthmore College.

Giuseppe Spina is an Italian filmmaker based in Bologna. His films have been screened at numerous international festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF and Annecy’s IAFF. He is the co-founder of Nomadica, an international network of artists and intellectuals focused on experimental cinema.

Chris Strickler is from West Lafayette, Indiana, US of A. He graduated with a BMA in animation from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada in 2018. He likes creating abstract work exploring materiality and time. He is also an interactive installation artist and amateur VJ. 

ellie swensson is a queer southern ex-pat currently writing poems in denver, CO. she earned her MFA from Naropa in 2015 and is the founder and co-director of Bolder Writers Warehouse, a mobile writers’ community resource. swensson is a firm believer that poetics is what occurs where eros, divinity, activism, and careful craft intersect. her first book of poems, salt of us, is forthcoming from Punch Drunk Press this October. and while she encourages you to buy a copy (of 2) of her book, she will always, always prefer her words alive in the mouth and the body. “I have a few thematic voices I like to travel between in a reading: activist, witchy/divinatory, and erotic. All of these can be involved in a single piece or embodied in their own distinctive cadence. Vulnerability, responsibility, and evocation are goals for my writing and performances. I honestly have no idea what pieces I will bring or create for this event. I’m feeling called to expressing more intimacy these days, the minutia of lovers and of inspiration and of revelation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that motivation carries into this set.”

Agustin Telo is a graduate of Image and Sound Design, in the Buenos Aires University (UBA), with courses and seminars of photography, cinema and visual arts. His work goes through diverse techniques (motion images proyections, animation and digital video) and different supports and materials (objects, textil, ice or thrush installations). In recent years he has made video installations: El armario (2009),  El Lumenario (2012), Dilusión (2017), exhibiting in various museums and galleries of Buenos Aires. In 2018, premiered the experimental short film Topographies of a Distant Noise, participating in various national and international film festivals. Nowadays, he works on his own over experimental video projects by intervening film materials from digital processes.

Espen Tversland. “My work is concerned with our environment and the part that we are playing in its alteration i.e. the Anthropocene. In my art I express my thoughts and emotions about human drive. Mankind’s brilliant discoveries and achievements against the cost and consequences of them through history, culture and an uncertain future. My artwork is made from my imagination, research and memory after making trips to explore landscapes of the north, which is also part of my home.” – ET

Themba Twala is a freelancing editor, videographer and musician based in Johannesburg. After graduating from the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, Themba Twala was selected as one of the top 12 graduates from around the country for the M-net Magic in Motion academy, in which he shot an edited various work for urban television channels such as Trace, MTV Base, Kyknet, SABC, M-net and Mzansi Magic. He currently works as the in-house videographer and editor for C Saw Media.

Experimental filmmaker, video artist and independent curator, Guillaume Vallée graduated from Concordia University with a Major in Film Animation and an MFA in Studio Arts – Film Production option. He’s interested in alternative forms of moving images in analogue forms as a way of considering the direct interaction between different mediums. His work is an exploration of materiality within the creative process. In attempts of creating a more complex relationship with his subject matter, Vallée makes use of cross-medium forms that range from camera-less techniques to optical effects, glitch, video feedback, resulting in expended & hybrid pieces. He works mainly on Super8, 16mm and VHS. 
Vallée is questioning the notions of recycling & reappropriation, treating all material as found footage within a collaborative practice, in film, video & performance. His audiovisual performances have been shown in various festivals in Canada, USA, France, Italy and Japan and his experimental films and videos, distributed by Vidéographe and Winnipeg Film Group, have been screened internationally. His short film, Le bulbe tragique, won the ”Best Canadian Work” at WNDX (Festival of Moving Image) in 2016. 
Guillaume Vallée has been an artist-in-residence at La Bande Vidéo (Quebec, Canada) in 2017 and at Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, FR) & Signal Culture (Owego, USA) in 2018.

Emily Van Loan (b. 1994) is a diaristic experimental filmmaker and artist interested in vulnerability, emotional intimacy, and self-disclosure. She is pursuing an MFA in Filmmaking at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she works on films, installations, and performances that incorporate her own autobiography, and attempt to create a connection between herself and her audience, as well as connections within an audience.

Estelle Vétois was born in Paris in 1992.During her studies of information and communication where she was introduced to the sociology of mass media, Estelle Vétois began to develop a reflection on the use of photography or video in the media, especially on television. It is for her to no longer consider these images as objective evidence but as a construction of the real. From 2014, she continues her training at the School of Fine Arts in Metz. Faced with our increasingly excessive consumption of images and the resulting visual saturation, she decides to work on the fragility of the image, to explore its technical limits and to reveal its missing part. She draws inspiration from images she finds on television or at flea markets. This is to stop the flow and slow down, to find a new temporality for the image. She graduated (master degree) in 2018 with the congratulations of the jury and won the first prize in her school for Crash Test. In the same year, she received the Rotary Award for another piece : Unknown Location. Her work has recently been shown at Galerie Neuf in Nancy, at Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, at Galerie 0.15 in Metz.

Marián Vredík and Jana Vredík Hirnerová graduated from the Painting College. Recently, however, he has been making animated films as directors, artists and animators. Authors also approach to making video clips or TV series. They also work with other filmmakers on various projects. Their video “Flush It Out” received the 2019 An?a Music Video Award Special Mention. They live and work in Pezinok (Slovakia).

Kelley Ann Walsh likes to move, wiggle, shake, and jiggle.  She is an Appalachian performing artist and scholar whose work explores identity through interdisciplinary and collaborative play.  Reoccurring themes in her work include feelings of displacement, trauma, dis/ability, feminist ruminations, the military, the fallacy of binaries, and Appalachia.Kelley Ann’s work has been presented across the country.  In 2018, she received the Boulder International Fringe Festival’s ‘Hibner Brown Award: Most Important Historical Message’ for her interdisciplinary collaborative work Where I’m from the Mountains are Red, White, and Yellow.  She has danced with Columbus Moving Company and John Gamble Dance Theater, and performed in works by Lux Boreal, Larry Keigwin, Bill Evans, and Taproot Dance Ensemble. Kelley Ann is a Third-Year Dance MFA Candidate and Graduate Part-Time Instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder.  She is also a Certified Movement Analyst and an Alexander Technique teacher.  She received a BFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a BA in Government from the College of William and Mary. Kelley Ann would like to take a moment to remind you that you can make a dance about anything, and everything is political.

Calum Walter is an artist working in sound and moving image. His work looks at memory, anxiety, and the cultural moment as seen through emerging and consumer technologies. His films have screened at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, FIC Valdivia, Vienna Independent Shorts, Images Festival, Slamdance and the Hong Kong Arts Centre. He is a 2018 MacDowell Fellow and has received awards from the Harpo Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. His work has been covered by Filmmaker Magazine, Fandor, Reverse Shot, and Cinema Scope Magazine. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University.

Brandon Wilson (b. 1982) grew up in the deserts of west Texas. He studied photography and painting and received a BA in studio arts from the University of Texas in Austin. He lives in a cabin in the woods of northwest Oregon and has been making films since 2014. 

Joanie Wind is a visual artist and filmmaker from Tucson, Arizona. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Eastern Michigan University in 2015. She now teaches art in the Detroit area and exhibits her work internationally.

Huang Xiaowen graduated from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, majored in oil painting. She is currently completing an MFA degree at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Now, she mainly focuses on audio-visual works and projection mapping.

Emine Yildirim is an award-winning screenwriter and producer. After graduating from METU Business Administration, she pursued a career in film and attended the Bilgi Uni Film Grad School. She has produced films such as Son Ç?k??/Siren’s Call ( Tokyo IFF Main Competition), Kusursuzlar/ The Impeccables (Busan FF, Antalya FF, Ankara FF, Romania International FF), The Monster’s Dinner ( Montpellier FF, Antalya, Ankara FF), Ziazan (Cannes Diversity), Gri Bölge/ Mother Virgin No More (Berlinale FF Generation). She has also written the screenplay of The Impeccables which garnered her a Best Screenplay Award from Ankara FF and the Flying Broom Women’s FF Bilge Olgaç Achievement award. She teaches screenwriting  at Kadir Has University Film Department Graduate Studies. She is an EAVE 2014 graduate.

Wendy Cong Zhao. “Hi! I am an artist based in New York. I make drawings and animations. I’m currently an MFA candidate at the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. My background is in Painting and Film Production, and I’ve been working and teaching in art and animation since 2011. My work explores a range of ideas, such as expressions of the human body, stories about immigration, and more.” – WCZ