A spiritual encounter blends the human and the immaterial realm.

Hannah Villanueva (Seattle, Wa.)

Hannah Villanueva is a poetry filmmaker and artist based in Seattle, Washington. Her work has been featured at Cadence Video Poetry Festival and in Third Thing Press. Previous works include Dream of a Seed (2025) and Residue (2022).

My experimental filmmaking practice and burgeoning skateboarding practice are both rooted in play, and both subcultures root me as amateur. I relish in the position of amateur filmmaking and skateboarding in my graduate thesis film, scrape, where I explore the overlap of both practices in their shared tactile and responsive gesture. There is synergy between my hand with a knife carving into the surface of the film strip, and my skateboard grinding against a ramp’s edge. Through documenting acts of failure and shedding skin, the making of scrape helps create an experimental filmmaking skateboarding community.

Sierra Grove (Boulder, Co.) 

Sierra Grove (they/she) is an artist working in film. They were recently awarded their MFA from University of Colorado at Boulder, and now work at a motion-picture film lab in Denver called Negative Space. Originally from Spokane, Washington and graduating from Evergreen State College in Olympia with a BA in Visual Art, they have shown work in festivals and galleries throughout the United States, including Film Diary NYC, Wicked Queer Boston and South Sound Experimental Film Festival. Their filmic work, deeply committed to alternative processes, often utilizing 16mm loops, found film and hand-drawn animation. Grove describes themselves as “passionate about serving the future of experimental media arts…by creating art and spaces that uphold values of creative liberation and accessibility.” Their films feel both intimate and immersive, pulling content from their surroundings – images of friends, audio of family, and cataloguing their body in space. They use play, chance, collage, and the unexpected nature of light, chemicals, and lenses in their work.

Hollowgram conjures varicolored clusters of swirling images and sounds from places real and imagined as if looking through a flip book in a dream. Narratively the film pilots the tension between the desire to share memories and possibilities with another and the failure of the attempt. Conceptually layered over, a defiant authorial selfhood responds to the outside interrogations that punch in, “Who do you think you are?”.

Laura Iancu (Romania) 

Iancu is a visual artist working primarily in experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation & gaming, with an expanded practice of installation and photography. Originally from Romania, she has been teaching and making films in the US for more than a decade. Currently, Laura is an assistant professor of cinema at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts.

Iancu’s films and games have been showcased at venues across the world including Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Indie Grits, Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Seattle Transmedia & Independent Film Festival, Festival ECRÃ, South Carolina Underground Film Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, CÓDEC Festival of Experimental Film and Video, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, International Video Poetry Festival Athens, San Diego Underground, Feminist Border Art Film Festival.

Her work originates from puzzling together all the hints of the world, the gestural intertextuality, the perceptive and surface qualities of objects, geographical mappings, aspects of sound art, critical theory, poetry, magic realism, pop/internet culture, dance, gardening and the myriad mutations of emerging moving image technologies.

From a taxi window in New York City, the sight of a yellow moon sparked a poem – the first thread of what would become this multidisciplinary project. Set in and around Portland, Oregon, ‘I Saw The Mountain’ expresses a weary hopefulness through intersecting spoken word, dance, and music.

Akila Fields (Portland, Or.)

Akila Fields is a musician, photographer, and, more recently, a filmmaker. Out of necessity, Akila uses whatever tools are available for creative expression, making music under the pseudonym “Palm Dat.”

Fog Mirror is a cut up video using photos from Flickr from 2004-2014 as raw material. It explores nostalgia and cultural memory, pulling from the forgotten archive of times gone by.

Chris Freeman (Portland, Or.)

Juxtaposing spacious moving images of the everyday with a voiced reflection on the busy life and everyday mystical moments, A Vernacular of the Numinous is a poetic meditation on the extraordinary ordinary.

A contemplative film inspired by an invitation to participate in Unpoetry at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Freeman’s A Vernacular of the Numinous is the latest addition to Cinema Divina–their offering of short films made through and for contemplative practice.

M Freeman (Olympia, Wa.) 

Media Artist | Writer | Queer | Contemplative

Interdisciplinary artist M Freeman (formerly Marilyn Freeman) works at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, queerness and film, and contemplative, creative and social art practices. Their films have screened on PBS and in museums, galleries, theaters, festivals, and retreat centers worldwide including British Film Institute, Seattle International Film Festival, Montreal’s Festival of International Cinema, Cologne’s Feminale, Sydney’s Queer Screen, Paris Lesbian Film Festival, L.A.’s Outfest, San Francisco’s Frameline, Bologna Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, Barcelona’s Int’l Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Powerhouse Arena in New York City, Ladyfests from Olympia to London, and Beijing Contemporary Art Center in China, Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum and . Freeman’s text and media arts essays are or have been published in/at Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, Rolling Stone, Fourth Genre, and Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances–online by The 3rd Thing Press.

Freeman is author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory & Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020, winner of the Nautilus Book Award’s Gold Medal for Creativity & Innovation) and creator of Cinema Divina–short evocative films made through and for contemplative practice. They are recipient of The Evergreen State College Faculty Foundation Grant, Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation Grant, Artist Trust Grants for Artist Projects, and multiple Washington State Artist Trust Media Arts Fellowships. Freeman’s work has screened recently at London’s MicroActs Artist Film Screenings, Albuquerque’s Experiments in Cinema, Madison’s Midwest Video Poetry Festival, L.A.’s Film and Video Poetry Symposium, Seattle’s Cadence Video Poetry Festival at Northwest Film Forum and Frye Art Museum, Copenhagen’s Nature & Culture Film Festival, Berlin’s Courage Film Festival, in Athens, Greece at the International Video Poetry Festival, and in Unpoetry at the Frye Art Museum.

An excavational inquiry through photographs, touch, and looking at times and places far from here and now, animating and conjuring a link between past and present.

Mahda Purmehdi (Boulder, Co.) 

Mahda Purmehdi (b. 1994) is an experimental filmmaker and educator. He works across the mediums of 16mm, Super 8 and digital video, often integrating original images, words, and sounds with reconfigured literary and audio-visual material.At the heart of his filmmaking practice are questions of modes of film production and the political implications of image-making. His films are characterized as visually tactile and handmade evocations, colliding archive and memory, visible and invisible, the living and ghosts, history (especially film history) and the forgotten.He received his BFA in Film from Tehran University of Art in 2019 and is currently pursuing his MFA in Film at the University of Colorado Boulder. His films have screened at festivals and venues around the world, including Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Light Matter Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, Emami Art Experimental Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, ULTRAcinema, Festival Fotogenia, Archivio Aperto, BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Moscow International Video Art Exhibition.

Three years have passed since Amatilla’s death, yet her presence lingers in fragments of memory and silence. A Yemenite grandson journals, not to resolve grief, but to inhabit it, to write as though each line from the past and present might return buried feelings. Amatilla unfolds as a quiet dialogue across absence, where the act of remembering becomes love and connection with the self again. Directed by Adham Garman, the experimental film carries the intimacy of a diary and the distance of exile, a meditation on loss, migration, and the traces of love and hope that remain after loss.

Directors Statement: Amatilla is an experimental short that emerges from the journals I had long been afraid to open. It is a return to the fragments of my past moments of migration from Yemen to Frankfurt and then to America and the effects it had with my relationship with my grandmother and my aunts and mother. How her life during war as a widow had paved the way for my dreams. The film is a meditation on longing for freedom, holding on to hope in the face of loss, and the persistence of love after death.

Adham Garman (NYC / Yemen)

Adham Garman a queer Yemen born, California raised and New york based director/writer. A current Philosophy and literature student with a minor in Film studies. Writings and films focusing on queer identity, cultural representation and racial politics from the SWANA region.

BOOKANIMA, a compound word of ‘Book’ and ‘Anima’, is Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to book. It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the third scope between Book and Cinema by Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Entienne Jules-Marey.

It experiments locomotion of Martial Arts along with its stream: Jeet Kune Do, Nunchaku, Shaolin Quan, Chinese Kick, Praying Mantis, Tai Chi, Baguazhang, Wing Chun Quan, Karate, Judo, Gon, Kendo, Kyudo, Sumo, Sibpalki, Taekkyeon, Taekwondo, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, Wrestling, Boxing, Fencing, Jiu-Jitsu, Krav Maga, Kali, Arnis, Capoeira, MMA, Stunt Action, etc.


Shon Kim (Los Angeles) 

SHON KIM majored in Film & Video at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA of Experimental Animation at CalArts, and Ph.D of Animation Theory at Chung-Ang University. SHON KIM works in LA.