SFCINEMATHEQUE

Alexandra Cuesta (US/Ecuador). Her films combine experimental film traditions with documentary practices and investigate the reciprocity of the gaze in time based representation. Her work has screened in festivals including the New York Film Festival, Cinema Du Réel, FIDMarseille, BFI London and others as well as Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MOCA, Palacio de Bellas Artes and other venues. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Film and Video. In 2021 she was selected for Berlinale Talents and Doc Station. Currently, she is developing her second feature length film.

Vicky Smith’s (UK) work in experimental animation explores the vulnerable and vital body. Her work has screened internationally in galleries and festivals including, in 2021: A Picture of Health at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Raw Vision in Splash, Scratch, Dunk! Films Made by Hand at London Barbican; and Bodies and Boundaries, Cinenova UK. She runs workshops in experimental film practice and has curated many film screenings, including recently Go, Go, Go! Women in Experimental Animation (2019). Publications include: Hand Drawn and Non-Natural Colour in Films by Barbara Hammer and Sandra Lahire in Animation Studies Online (2021); Experimental & Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives and Practices, co-edited with Nicky Hamlyn (2018), and in Animation Practice, Production & Process, Issue 7 (2019).

Emily Margaret Van Loan (US) is an experimental filmmaker and artist. They create diaristic, autobiographical works with the intention of fostering connections between audience and maker or perhaps within an audience.

Erin Espelie (US) is a filmmaker and writer based in the fire-prone foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She co-directs NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder and serves as editor in chief of Natural History magazine.

Paige Taul (US) is an Oakland CA native who received her BA in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her interests lie in observing environmental and familial connections to concepts tied to race based expectations and to expose those boundaries of identity in veins such as religion, style, language and other black community based experiences. She currently resides in Chicago.

Courtney Stephens (US) is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films address the contours of language, historical memory and women’s lives. Her work has been exhibited at the Berlinale, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art, South by Southwest, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hong Kong, Camden, Mumbai, Luxembourg, Dhaka and San Francisco International Film Festivals. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a California Humanities Grant, fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Pocantico and the Sloan Foundation and was one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s twenty-five “New Faces of Independent Film.” A graduate of the American Film Institute, she co-founded the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud and has curated film programs for The Getty Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, UnionDocs and Flaherty NYC.

Dianna Barrie (Australia; b. 1972, Melbourne) found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy, both of which she has studied formally at the postgraduate level. Ever pushing the limits of the hand processing of Super-8mm led to the establishment of Nanolab with Richard Tuohy in 2006. Dianna’s film work could perhaps be characterised as “direct chemical” filmmaking. In 2012, Dianna helped establish Artist Film Workshop, where celluloid is embraced and advocated by a community of practitioners in Melbourne. As a notable figure in the international artist-run film labs movement, she and her partner spend a significant amount of time each year touring their joint film programs and conducting workshops and masterclasses in hand-made film practice. Dianna was also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.

Federica Foglia (Canada) is a transnational visual artist and writer. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Digital Computing for Humanities: History of Art, Theatre, and Cinema from the University of Naples L’Orientale; an MFA in Film from York University, Toronto and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Arts at York University. She is interested in issues of immigration, citizenship and identity, displacement, women of the diaspora, migrant temporalities, and finding a visual language to investigate these experiences. Her practice revolves around recycled cinema, amateur filmmaking and imaginary archives. She works within the domestic space to remediate found-footage films. She is currently working on a project that involves eco-friendly emulsion lifting techniques of 16mm orphan films from private estates and family archives.​

Erica Sheu (Taiwan). 徐璐 is an experimental filmmaker who works with celluloid. Her interests include everyday objects, abstract audiovisual emotion/expression, isolation/belonging and Taiwanese identity politics. Her work has been shown at festivals and venues such as Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CROSSROADS, EXiS, Microscope Gallery, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and experimental film programs at the 2018 Taiwan Biennial, among other venues. Sheu currently lives in Los Angeles and studies in the Film/Video MFA program at the California Institute of the Arts.