Soft Studio NYC Launches In-Person Somatic Coaching Practice in Manhattan’s East Village

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York, NY – August, 2025 – Artist and somatic coach Michèle Saint-Michel announces the opening of Soft Studio NYC, an in-person somatic coaching practice located at Downtown Art Studios in Manhattan’s East Village. The practice offers one-on-one sessions designed to help clients regulate their nervous systems, restore clarity, and reconnect with their creative and emotional presence.

“Most people try to think their way out of stress,” says Saint-Michel. “At Soft Studio NYC, we begin in the body. When the body is attuned, the mind follows.”

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A Different Approach to Clarity and Presence

Somatic coaching is a body-centered method that integrates nervous system regulation, guided movement, and reflective conversation. Unlike therapy, which often emphasizes diagnosis or analysis, somatic coaching focuses on the present moment—interrupting cycles of burnout, over-functioning, and overwhelm.

Each session includes:

• Space to be heard and witnessed without rushing or fixing

• Gentle somatic techniques inspired by body-based modalities

• Breath-based attunement and guided movement exploration

• Personalized integration notes and somatic prompts to extend the work beyond the studio

Soft Studio NYC is designed for those navigating transition, creative stagnation, or the need to re-establish balance in daily life. Common themes explored with clients include reconnecting after burnout, making aligned decisions without self-abandonment, and reclaiming emotional honesty and creative direction.

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Why In-Person Matters

Sessions take place at the beautiful Downtown Art Studios (70 E 4th St), a quiet and light-filled space located in the heart of the East Village. Working in person allows for immediate feedback, deeper presence, and relief from screen fatigue—helping clients reconnect to themselves without distraction.

Pricing and Packages

• Introductory Session (new clients only): $90 (60 minutes)

• Standard Session: $275 (60 minutes)

• 3-Session Package: $750 (save $75)

• 6-Session Package: $1,440 (save $210)

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Soft Studio NYC Somatic Coaching

Soft Studio NYC from Michèle Saint-Michel offers somatic coaching, 1:1 to reconnect with your body, rhythm, and clarity.

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About the Founder

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, artist, and curator whose work spans grief studies, poetry-film, and somatic practice. With a background in modern dance, movement research, and body-based methods, she brings a unique perspective to coaching—one that bridges art, embodiment, and personal transformation.

“Change often begins in the body,” says Saint-Michel. “Soft Studio is where people can begin again.”

Booking and Contact

Soft Studio NYC is now accepting new clients.
Book an Intro Session: https://calendly.com/softstudionyc

For inquiries, please contact:
Michèle Saint-Michel
Founder, Soft Studio NYC
Email: michelesaintmichel@gmail.com
Website: https://michelesaintmichel.com/softstudionyc

Open Call: Skin in the Game — Group Exhibition & Poetry Publication

Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel
Risograph publication via Bad Saturn Media
Hosted at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY — October 24–30, 2025

Skin in the Game, a group exhibition and poetry publication curated by Michèle St. Michel. October 24–30, 2025 at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn. Poster design by Bad Saturn.

Skin in the Game is a group exhibition, screening, and risograph poetry collection, exploring what it means to put your body—your real, pulsing, breakable body—on the line. In love. In labor. In protest. In performance.

The works in this show will speak from the surface of the skin and the space just beneath it: the site of contact, vulnerability, memory, and commitment.

We are currently accepting submissions from artists, filmmakers, writers, performers, poets, and interdisciplinary creators. We’re especially interested in work that engages somatic and surreal processes—work that treats the body as both map and threshold. Pieces may lean into vulnerability, trace pain, track sensation, or reflect states of transformation.

You might be working in movement, sound, moving image, sculpture, text, or something that refuses to stay in one category. We welcome both tender and feral approaches—work that speaks from love, grief, protest, performance, memory, or metamorphosis.

We are especially interested in:

• embodiment as resistance or risk

• somatic memory, wounds, and healing

• surreal or speculative approaches to self-mapping

• clothing, fabric, or veils as material containers for the body

• gestures of intimacy, care, rupture, resistance, or emotional exposure

• the body as archive, battlefield, altar, or document

This is not a metaphorical call for neat ideas dressed in flesh. This is a call for the messy, the tender. Artists who are living their questions. Work that holds a pulse. Presence and exposure. The body as archive. The body as question. The body as offering.

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Submission Categories

Short Film & Video Art
Runtime: Up to 15 minutes
Main screening on Friday, October 24

Installation, Visual Art, & Sculptural Work
For gallery display. The venue is small and best suited for 3 to 8 works.
Please outline technical and spatial needs.

Sound / Performance / Movement
Live or embodied pieces will be programmed for Saturday, October 25.

Concrete Poetry for Risograph Publication
Bad Saturn will publish a curated collection of concrete, visual, and somatic poetry in conjunction with the exhibition. Please submit up to 2 poems or 2 pages total, formatted to fit 5.25 x 8 inches, portrait or square. Accepted work will be printed via risograph and released during the show.

Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: Friday, August 1, 2025 at 5pm EST

• Notification of Acceptance: September 8, 2025

• Installation: Thursday, October 23, 2025

• Main Screening & Opening: Friday, October 24, 2025

• Performance Night: Saturday, October 25, 2025

• Gallery Exhibition Run: October 24–30, 2025

• Deinstallation: Thursday, October 30, 2025

We have a limited number of sponsored entries available for those with financial need. To request a fee waiver, email michelesaintmichel@gmail.com with a brief note.

Poetry in Motion: Poetry Filmmaking Workshop with Michèle Saint-Michel (July 23, Brooklyn + Online)

Poetry in Motion: A Hybrid Workshop with Michèle Saint-Michel

Exploring the intimate space where image and language meet
July 23 · 7–9 PM ET · In-Person (Brooklyn) + Online
Sliding Scale: $15 ·

Poetry films don’t ask to be explained. They ask to be felt.

They breathe. They shimmer. They hold contradiction. They allow for the fragmented, the elliptical, the quiet. In this spirit, artist and filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel will lead Poetry in Motion—a hybrid workshop on July 23 that invites participants to explore filmmaking as a poetic and collaborative gesture.

Offered both in-person at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn and online, this two-hour session is an expansion of Saint-Michel’s own practice: working at the edge of language, grief, and gesture to create soft, layered forms that speak across time.

Rather than focusing on polished technique or technical jargon, the session centers presence, attention, and creative intuition. It’s about image as sensation. It’s about sound as memory. It’s about making something small together, and letting it ripple.

What to Expect

Participants will co-create a collaborative short film using their own submitted footage. Each person is invited to shoot and send a short (one minute or less) video on their phone in advance of the workshop. This video should include:

— one poetic object
— one scene of life

It can be abstract or literal, quiet or vivid. There’s no right way to film—only the invitation to notice differently.

To participate, please send your video to info@millenniumfilm.org by July 16. You’ll then be included in the collective piece we’ll build during the session.

This workshop is open to all—whether you’re a filmmaker, poet, dancer, dreamer, or someone who simply wants to explore new ways of seeing. No prior experience is required. Just a phone, a little time, and a willingness to make something honest.

About the Artist

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet whose work explores power, feminist ecologies, quantum mechanics, somatic memory, and the poetics of grief. Trained in both dance and writing, she works across film, installation, sound, and text to create emotionally resonant works that foreground care, resistance, and nonlinear time. Her work has been shown internationally at festivals and galleries including Prismatic Ground, hARTSlane, Fisura, APT Gallery, and Biodromo, and she currently curates art and film programs in New York City.

Poetry in Motion
Date: Tuesday, July 23
Time: 7:00–9:00 PM Eastern
Location: In-person (Brooklyn) + Online
Sliding Scale: $15
RSVP & Footage Submission: info@millenniumfilm.org by July 16

This is a workshop for the soft-hearted. The bold quiet ones. The ones who want to make something real.

Quantum Intimacies: An Exhibition on Entanglement, Memory, and the Unseen Forces That Shape Us

Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY

June 19–25, 2025
Screenings • Installations • Poetry • Live Performance
Presented by Millennium Film Workshop + Bad Saturn Media

How do we touch across time? How does longing refract across parallel selves?
Quantum Intimacies is not an exhibition about intimacy—but an intimate exhibition. One that extends care, insists on slowness, and recognizes softening as resistance. It asks not just how we touch, but how we are touched—by each other, by time, by the things we cannot see but always feel.

Curated by artist-filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel, Quantum Intimacies is a week-long exhibition and screening series drawing from quantum mechanics, somatic memory, and poetic speculation to explore the architectures of intimacy: those ephemeral structures built between bodies, across distances, and within absences.

Presented at the storied Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, the exhibition invites viewers to consider presence as porous and relational. Here, grief, desire, and connection are not simply emotions—but energetic states.

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Quantum Intimacies screening at Millennium Film Workshop, curated by Michèle Saint-Michel. Featuring over 60 international artists exploring intimacy, somatic memory, and the metaphysics of time through experimental film, poetry, and performance.

Featured Works: Screenings, Installations, and Performance

Over 60 international artists contribute to the project across experimental film, installation, poetry, and live performance. Works explore how intimacy endures, flickers, or ruptures through gesture, memory, ritual, and time-based media. These are not sentimental encounters but quantum ones: uncertain, vibrating, entangled.

SCREENING PROGRAMS

Program A (Approx. 65 minutes)

• The Beach – Tom Faber – 12:14

• The 8th of April, 2024 – Patrick Marshall – 2:57

• JC Retell – Molly Miller – 4:58

• A robin in the room – Nicolás M. Pintos – 8:37

• November Inside: Hommage á Miroslav Tichy – Réka Szűcs – 3:10

• When I Look at the Sun – Mahesh Subramaniam – 7:14

• du soleil, que ça existe – Charlotte Clermont – 9:05

• body parts_ – Paula Stuttman – 2:26

• Hold – Erica Schreiner – 6:44

• Mom’s Story – Chanika Svetvilas – 3:24

• Confetti – Amanda Bonaiuto – 4:15

• Night Music – Edwin Rostron – 3:25

Program B (Approx. 65 minutes)

• Blue Alchemy – Benett Holgerson – 11:30

• Slowly, We Drift Apart – Sogol & Joubeen – 9:57

• Telephones – Copper Giloth – 4:31

• 4622 Stillwater Circle – Kati Rehbeck – 11:18

• closure – sierra francesca enea – 3:08

• Hollowgram – Laura Iancu – 7:00

• Incubating Home – Soyeon Jung – 3:15

• Dream Sequence: Stasis – Adam E. Stone – 2:40

• pre occupation – Tashrika Sharma – 7:24

• we will find a way – Maya Ivona – 6:01

• Pilote – Sidney Mandros & Giancarlo M. Sandoval – 10:36

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THEMATIC LOOPS

Wave Particle Duality

Non Films, Clay Steakley, Maya Ivona, Long Pham, Saif Alsaegh, Anna Maguire & Kyle Greenberg (STUPID CO), Danielle Vishlitzky, Lula O'Donnell, Ao Lei, Peter Whittenberger

Superposition

Carlos Vásquez Méndez, Kasper Klop & Morwenna Spagnol, Ye Mimi, Scott Turri, Mark Street, David Baeumler, Sara C. Sun, Cheryl Maeder, ayla khan, Marcie Begleiter

Entanglement

Barry Hollow, Zhiqian Wang, stephanie barber, Matthew Berka, Eric Souther, Alex Schuurbiers, Tumí Johnson, Wenwen Zhu, Cali M. Banks, Jacklyn Brickman

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Reuben Son installing After Orpheus at Quantum Intimacies. Suspended by wire and tension, the piece explores sonic resonance, memory, and the edge between matter and vibration. Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn.

GALLERY INSTALLATIONS

Audrey Coombe – State Change
Single-channel video loop (4:39 min)
A meditation on quantum thresholds through water’s shift from liquid to vapor, observing change as a slow accumulation of micro-events.

Evangeline LaRue – Delicacy
Fabric installation (~3x3 ft)
A surrealist quilted work on fragility, soul-body disconnection, and gendered embodiment by a disabled, genderqueer artist.

Reuben Son – After Orpheus
Mixed media sculpture (metal and ceramics)
A suspended vessel vibrating between memory and materiality, exploring cinematic time and physical resonance.

Payá (Anna Fern and Vida Zamora) – A Letter
Film installation with hand-built sculpture and organic materials (20 min)
A poetic excavation of time and correspondence, questioning anthropocentric timelines and proposing collective care.

Eileen Ramos – Correspondence
Dual rolodex sculpture
Paired ephemeral cards shuffled by viewers to reveal layered, unexpected entanglements—multitemporal, accidental, and intimate.

Katrina Slavik – Ghost in the Supply Chain
Textile wall works
Human-sea life hybrids stitched into soft panels to illuminate empathy, consumption, and displacement across species lines.

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LIVE EVENTS

Poetry Reading & Live Projection Performance
Thursday, June 19 at 8PM
Featuring a five-projector live-feed performance by Yue Hua and poetry by Kristen Tomanocy, fusing language and light across thresholds of grief and gesture.

Gallery Opening & Main Screening
Friday, June 20 at 6:30PM & 8PM
Simulcast and in-person screening featuring international artists working across experimental film and time-based poetics.

Artbook Launch: a collapsible mercy

Published by Bad Saturn

Staple-bound reader editions of a collapsible mercy, created to accompany the original hand-sewn artbook by Michèle Saint-Michel. Published by Bad Saturn for Quantum Intimacies, these versions allow viewers to engage with the poetry without handling the fragile silk-bound object.

a collapsible mercy is a limited edition poetry-artbook that expands the exhibition into tactile form. Each poem is sewn into teabag paper and veiled in hand-dyed organza silk—an origami wave that must be folded to be read. Some words remain hidden, like meaning in a quantum field. This is not a book but an event: a moment of fragile, folding intimacy.

Featured Poets:

• Kristen Tomanocy – NYC-based poet and educator, writing on grief, cosmos, and loss.

• Riverstone (Yuying Song) – London-based poet of myth, dream, and gender-liminality.

• Alexis Krasilovsky – Famed feminist poet and filmmaker, author of Watermelon Linguistics.

• Kate Fahey – Irish artist and PhD, merging image-making with poetic fragility.

Artbook Designer: Michèle Saint-Michel—filmmaker, poet, and intermedia artist whose work includes handmade rituals of care, folding, and somatic memory.

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About the Curator

Michèle Saint-Michel is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet. Her work explores grief, metaphysics, and embodied memory through moving image, sound, and poetic form. As a curator, she creates multidisciplinary programs that hold space for experimental voices and reimagine intimacy across form and discipline.

About the Partners

Millennium Film Workshop
An artist-run space with a legacy dating back to 1966, Millennium has supported generations of experimental filmmakers through screenings, residencies, and equipment access.

Bad Saturn Media
An independent press publishing artist books, sonic projects, and poetic experiments. Dedicated to the strange, the vulnerable, and the radical edges of form.

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Visit the Exhibition

Quantum Intimacies
Millennium Film Workshop
June 19–25, 2025
Location: 167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Programs, installations, and performances

Apparitions Compilation Release: Exploring Spectral Resistance in Art, Politics, and Memory

I’m thrilled to announce that my work is featured in the newly released compilation Apparitions, now available in the UK and Australia from tent.press.

The cover of Apparitions, a newly released compilation featuring work by Michèle Saint-Michel, explores the spectral, the remembered, and the resistant, offering a deep dive into how haunting can challenge dominant structures and open up new possibilities for memory and future.

Apparitions is a curated collection that brings together an exceptional array of poetry, essays, art, and imagery, delving into themes of the spectral, the remembered, and the resistant. The collection serves as both a site of lamentation and a portal to the generative nature of haunting. It invites readers to reflect on how the apparitional—those traces, visitants, and phantoms—might disrupt dominant structures and summon new forms of memory and future possibilities.

The works in Apparitions speak to the power of the spectral in our sociological imagination, asking: How does the presence of the unseen shape the way we understand the world? How do these spectral forces become tools for resistance, and how do they challenge entrenched narratives?

A glimpse inside Apparitions, where poetry, essays, and visual art converge to interrogate the role of the spectral in the sociological imagination, memory work, and resistance. This collection offers powerful perspectives on the generative nature of haunting and its impact on art and politics.

This aligns closely with my own artistic and scholarly focus, where I examine the intersections of power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and quantum mechanics. My research investigates how memory, both somatic and cultural, influences our understanding of the past, present, and future. The concept of haunting, which threads through Apparitions, resonates deeply with my work, where I explore how these spectral forces—whether through art or memory—challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative ways of knowing and being.

As part of my ongoing engagement with visual culture and the politics of the image, I draw from my academic experiences, including my MA in Artists’ Film & Moving Image from Goldsmiths, University of London. My research and creative practice consistently interrogate the role of art in reshaping our perceptions of time, space, and memory. These interests inform my contributions to Apparitions, where the act of re-visioning—both personal and collective—is central to the work.

I’m deeply honored to be part of this collection, which brings together powerful voices and perspectives on spectral resistance. If you're in the UK or Australia, you can now grab your copy of Apparitions from tent.press and engage with this compelling body of work.

Let the ghosts speak.

Available now via Tent.press in the UK and Australia.

#capitalistrealism #ghostlymatters #allegoryofthecavepainting #visualculture #artandpolitics #memorywork #spatialpractice #Goldsmiths #artatGoldsmiths #spectralresistance #contemporaryart #artbook #artsandpolitics

Unfolding Grief: How the Origami Swan Guides Us Through Loss

The Art of Healing

Grief is a complex emotion, often difficult to process through words alone. But what if art, rather than language, could provide a route to healing? Grief Is an Origami Swan by Michèle Saint-Michel introduces a unique way of coping with loss through the meditative and symbolic practice of origami.

Whether you are navigating the depths of personal loss or simply seeking a creative way to honor your grief, this guide offers gentle companionship on the journey toward healing.

Swans, known for their grace and loyalty, serve as powerful symbols of transformation during times of loss.

The Symbolism of the Swan in Grief

The swan has long been a symbol of grace, transformation, and resilience. In many cultures, the swan represents a deep emotional process—often related to the passage between life and death. Just as the swan sheds its feathers and enters a new season of life, we too can embrace the transformative power of grief.

Grief can be overwhelming, but like the swan, it can also be a quiet and sacred experience. The act of folding paper swans in Grief Is an Origami Swan mirrors the emotional journey of folding grief into something beautiful, offering a form of release and remembrance.

Origami: A Meditative Practice for Mourning

Origami, the art of paper folding, is much more than a craft. It’s a practice of presence, focus, and mindfulness—qualities that can be deeply healing during times of grief. In Grief Is an Origami Swan, Michèle Saint-Michel guides you through the process of folding paper swans as a meditative ritual.

Each fold represents a step in the grieving process: a gentle approach to the unfolding of emotions, memories, and healing. As you focus on the delicate art of paper folding, you’ll find a space where sorrow can be transformed into something tangible and beautiful.

Each fold of the origami swan represents a step in the healing journey, offering a tangible way to process grief.

Integrating Art into Grief Rituals

While grief is a personal journey, sharing the process with others can provide a sense of comfort and connection. By incorporating origami swans into personal or communal grief rituals, you create a space for collective healing. Whether you’re participating in a group therapy session, creating a personal memorial, or simply sharing your experience with a friend, the swan offers a tangible symbol of the journey.

Engaging in creative activities like art therapy can help express and process complex emotions associated with grief.

Consider organizing a small gathering where participants create their own origami swans as a way of processing grief together. This ritual becomes a shared experience—one that brings people closer while honoring the memory of those lost.

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Embracing the Journey of Healing

Grief is not linear; it is a journey full of twists, turns, and moments of reflection. The act of folding origami swans in Grief Is an Origami Swan provides a beautiful and meditative way to mark this journey. With each fold, you move closer to healing—gently embracing your emotions rather than fighting them.

If you’re ready to start your own healing journey through the art of origami, Grief Is an Origami Swan offers the tools, insight, and space to do so. Allow the origami swan to be your guide.

Download the free folding instructions for Grief is an Origami Swan and explore the healing power of origami. A meditative, tactile way to process grief and loss.

Download free folding instructions for Grief is an Origami Swan and embark on a tactile journey of healing through origami. These step-by-step instructions guide you in creating symbolic swans, each fold representing a step in the process of grief and recovery. Perfect for anyone seeking a creative and meditative way to navigate loss. Start folding today and transform grief into a meaningful, artistic ritual.

Open Call: Quantum Intimacies – Submit Experimental Film, Poetry & Media Art UPDATE: See the exhibition!

A Screening & Exhibition on Quantum Presence, Time, and Poetic Entanglement

Calling experimental filmmakers, poetic technologists, time-based media artists, and dreamers working across dimensions—Quantum Intimacies considers the forces that bind us beyond proximity, the echoes of presence in absence, and the paradox of being both here and elsewhere. Drawing from quantum mechanics, somatic memory, and poetic speculation, this exhibition and screening bring together works that explore relationality across distance, the fluidity of time, and the ephemeral architectures of intimacy.

Quantum Intimacies is a space where grief, longing, and love exceed their representational limits and take shape as forces in themselves. It asks not just how we touch, but how we are touched—by each other, by time, by the things we cannot see but always feel. Artists are invited to submit works that seemingly exist in multiple states at once: shifting, unfolding, and resonating across dimensions of time and space.

How do we touch across time? How does longing refract across parallel selves?

Quantum Intimacies — a multi-sensory screening and exhibition exploring presence beyond the visible. June 19–20, 2025 · Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel · Hosted by Millennium Film Workshop and Sponsored by Bad Saturn Media, Brooklyn.

What We’re Looking For

We invite submissions from artists, collectives, filmmakers, writers, and creative technologists working in time-based media. We’re especially drawn to interdisciplinary, experimental work that engages with quantum themes, including but not limited to:

• Non-Local Love & Entanglement: Long-distance intimacy, ancestral memory, or digital remnants of lost connections where time and space collapse.
• The Poetics of Probability: Embracing randomness, uncertainty, and intention in quantum states and artistic creation.
• Superposition & Multitemporality: Films that shift with each screening, fragmented narratives, or experiences shaped by the viewer.
• Somatic Frequencies & Resonance: Interactive, body-responsive works using sound, heartbeats, or immersive environments to explore presence.

Exhibition Details

Dates: June 19–20, 2025
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Curated by: Michèle Saint-Michel

Submission Deadlines

• Early Bird Deadline: Friday, April 18, 2025 (5 PM EST)
• Final Deadline: Friday, May 16, 2025 (5 PM EST)
• Notification Date: May 23, 2025

How to Submit

Complete the submission form and include the following:

• Basic contact details
• A short artist statement or bio (100 words)
• A 100-word description of how your work engages with the exhibition’s quantum themes

Media Submission Instructions

• Film/Video: Submit a Vimeo or YouTube link (with password if applicable)
• Gallery Installations: Email a proposal (PDF, up to 3 pages) with sketches to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com. Space is limited.
• Performance/Movement/Multimedia: Email a proposal (PDF, up to 3 pages) with sketches to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com
• Single Poem/Digital Artwork/Digital Poetic Instance: Send a 1–3 page PDF to badsaturnmedia@gmail.com

Multiple entries are permitted. Payments are accepted via Venmo and PayPal through our publisher. Submissions will not be reviewed until payment is received.

Contact

Questions? Reach out at badsaturnmedia@gmail.com.

Life and Death Are the Same Line: NYC Film Screening with Larry Gottheim, Clare Archibald, and Michèle Saint-Michel

Experimental film in NYC reaches a tender crescendo this May with Life and Death Are the Same Line Viewed from Different Sides — a powerful screening event curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop, featuring legendary avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim and boundary-breaking multidisciplinary artist Clare Archibald.

Life and Death Are the Same Line Viewed from Different Sides — an experimental film event on grief, memory, and becoming. Featuring work by avant-garde pioneer Larry Gottheim and Scottish filmmaker Clare Archibald, curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop.

Event Details
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Date: May 9, 2025
Time: 8:00 PM (Screening + Conversation)

Where NYC Experimental Film Meets the Line

This special evening brings together three moving image works that contemplate grief, time, birth, and departure through a distinctly avant-garde lens. From Larry Gottheim’s timeless filmic grammar to Clare Archibald’s deeply somatic and tactile filmmaking, these works reject linearity and collapse the divide between presence and absence, arrival and departure.

Together, they form a curated meditation on mortality, memory, and transformation, offering a space where art confronts the most profound human experiences with honesty, intimacy, and invention.

The Screening Program: Avant-Garde Cineman at Its Most Profound

HARMONICA (1971, 10 min) – Larry Gottheim
A one-take marvel of cinema vérité, HARMONICA captures spontaneous breath as music, wind as improvisation. It's a landmark of early American experimental film — playful, elemental, and foundational.

A PRIVATE ROOM (2019, 14 min) – Larry Gottheim
A metaphysical coda from one of America’s greatest avant-garde artists. With references to quantum theory and psychic interiority, A Private Room offers a ghostly meditation on language, death, and the unseen.

CAN YOU HEAR THE INTERIM (2020, 21 min) – Clare Archibald
A film of rare emotional gravity, Can You Hear the Interim documents the unthinkable: the birth of a child expected to die. Filmed with ultrasound gel, baby toys, and heartbeats, Archibald crafts a tactile sonic landscape that holds space for grief, transformation, and embodied witnessing.

Why This Screening Matters: Curatorially, Historically, and Personally

This program is not only a tribute to film as an expressive force — it is a conversation across generations of experimental cinema. By pairing Larry Gottheim, a foundational figure in American avant-garde film, with Clare Archibald’s raw, contemporary feminist filmmaking, the evening draws a line between legacy and future, structure and surrender, theoretical inquiry and lived experience.

As curator, Michèle Saint-Michel — herself a poet-filmmaker known for work exploring grief, quantum entanglement, and somatic memory — creates a space of radical softness and fierce clarity, where experimental film doesn't merely reflect life, but moves through it.

"Grief, for me, is a medium as much as film or sound. These works don’t observe life and death from afar — they enact them. They breathe, they ache, they shimmer."
— Michèle Saint-Michel

About the Filmmakers

Larry Gottheim
A giant in avant-garde cinema, Gottheim has been making films since the 1960s. His practice, spanning single-shot film to digital meditations, centers perception, presence, and metaphysical inquiry. This screening pairs one of his earliest 16mm pieces with his final digital work — a rare and moving juxtaposition of youthful improvisation and late-life reflection.

Clare Archibald
Scottish writer-artist Clare Archibald works across media, using sound, text, and film to explore intimate geographies of experience. Can You Hear the Interim is both a stand-alone film and a chapter of her forthcoming book, The Absolution of Shyness. Her work is a beacon in contemporary feminist and autobiographical film practice.

About the Curator: Michèle Saint-Michel

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, curator, and intermedia artist based in New York City. Her works explore grief, feminist ecologies, and quantum mechanics through somatic movement, poetry, and cinema. At Millennium Film Workshop, she curates programs that bring tenderness and rigor into conversation, foregrounding care, embodiment, and radical intimacy in experimental film.

Millennium Film Workshop

Founded in 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has supported generations of visionary moving image artists. A filmmaker-led nonprofit, it offers affordable access to film equipment, screenings, and community programming. It’s the place where avant-garde cinema is not only shown — but shaped.

Why You Should Attend

• Discover rare and historic experimental films by icons of the avant-garde.

• Witness a deeply moving contemporary work about motherhood, death, and love.

• Be part of NYC’s experimental film scene, in conversation with curators and fellow cinephiles.

• Sit in stillness, uncertainty, and awe — and find meaning in the flicker between life and death.

Reserve tickets now and witness what it means when avant-garde film dares to confront the most sacred transitions we face.

@michelesaintmichel | @millenniumfilm

Grief is an Origami Swan by Michèle Saint-Michel: A Grieving Companion for the Impossible Days

When Grief Feels Impossible, Grief is an Origami Swan is Here to Hold You

There will be days when it feels impossible.
Days when the air is too heavy, the memories too sharp.

On those days, cling to the pages of Grief is an Origami Swan by Michèle Saint-Michel — a grief book unlike any other. Created for those who’ve loved deeply and lost, it offers softness, ritual, and presence when the world feels too loud.

A new reader recently shared:

“As I adjust to a life without them… it seems truly impossible. But your book is a handsome companion for the moment, something to literally cling to... Thank you very much. I’m really glad it made its way into my hands.”

If we live long enough and love deeply, grieving becomes a part of living. Many things end before we’re ready. But just as holidays and traditions mark our most meaningful connections, grief reminds us of how deeply we’ve felt — and how human that makes us.

You have loved.
You have lost.
And it hurts.

Let this book help you make space for that duality. Grief has no timeline. Your pain — rooted in love — belongs in the story of your life.

Grief is an Origami Swan by Michèle Saint-Michel — a gentle companion for those navigating love, loss, and the impossible days

On impossible days, cling to what keeps you here.
A page. A friend. A quiet moment. A folded paper swan.

Take a shower.
Water a plant.
Hug your fur friend.
Take a walk.
Fold another swan.

Keep going.
Do the impossible.

✨ Grief is an Origami Swan is available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

📚 For more grief support, resources, and reflections from Michèle Saint-Michel, visit instagram.com/griefswan.

🕊️ Join our community of readers honoring the art of grieving, healing, and soft resistance.

#GriefHelp #GriefBooks #GriefIsAnOrigamiSwan #GrievingSwan #MicheleSaintMichel #BooksOnGrief #HealingThroughArt

Sold-Out Art Film Exhibition “Between a Frame and a Soft Place” Showcases Digital Body in NYC

Curator Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop during the sold-out NYC exhibition "Between a Frame and a Soft Place" — where digital embodiment met experimental cinema.

Curated by experimental filmmaker and artist Michèle Saint-Michel, the hybrid event brought together global artists in a celebration of digital embodiment and avant-garde cinema.

Brooklyn, NY — April 11–17, 2025
Between a Frame and a Soft Place, a sold-out hybrid exhibition curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, transformed Millennium Film Workshop into a hub for experimental film, performance, and digital poetics.

Over the course of seven days, the program invited audiences to reimagine embodiment through a series of avant-garde film screenings, a boundary-pushing performance night, immersive gallery installations, and a poetry reading with an accompanying zine launch.

Bringing together more than 60 international artists working across moving image, performance, poetry, and installation, the exhibition investigated how the body mutates across digital landscapes and tangible realities. Featured artists included Lisa Crafts, Lili White, Sapphire Goss, Audrey Coombe, Ellen Gilbert, Fiona Jacobson-Yang, Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas, Soo Hyun Lee, Riley Tu, and members of the London-based Digital Bodies Collective.

Visitor watching a film work by artist Soo Hyun-Lee in the Gallery space at Between a Frame and a Soft Place.

Artist Jenna Caravello reinterprets digital embodiment through live movement at Michèle Saint-Michel’s NYC exhibition “Between a Frame and a Soft Place”.

The live performance night was a standout, featuring Jenna Caravello (Los Angeles), indexthumb and Aleth Berenice (London), and Mackenzie Rawls (Brooklyn), whose works pushed the boundaries of physical and virtual perception.

Poet Gabriela Michele with her copy of the limited-run poetry zine published by Bad Saturn Media launched alongside Michèle Saint-Michel’s exhibition Between a Frame and a Soft Place in NYC.

The limited-edition zine, published by Bad Saturn Media, featured poetry and visual art from 20 contributors and sold out during a special reading with Vincent Katz (NYC), Matt McKinzie (Brooklyn), Gabriela Michele (Scotland), Kate Mohanty (Brooklyn), Kevin Chen (Brooklyn), Jaime Yuan (London), Lauren Dana Smith (Taos, New Mexico) and others. Audience members praised the zine and event for offering a “sensorial soft space” where movement, memory, and media converged.

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About the Curator: Michèle Saint-Michel

A new figure in NYC’s experimental film and artist film scenes, Michèle Saint-Michel creates curatorial and cinematic work that foregrounds power, grief, digital intimacy, and care-full futures. Her interdisciplinary approach weaves together feminist theory, quantum mechanics, and healing praxis, establishing her as a visionary voice in contemporary moving image art.

More about Michèle St. Michel

About Millennium Film Workshop

A cornerstone of New York City’s independent film scene since 1966, Millennium Film Workshop remains a vital hub for experimental media, supporting boundary-breaking filmmakers through screenings, workshops, and residencies.

About Bad Saturn Media

An artist-led publishing platform, Bad Saturn Media amplifies experimental voices through poetry books, hybrid zines, and artist collaborations that reshape the cultural conversation around identity, grief, and radical imagination.

A very few copies of the zine remain, grab one here.

Press Contact

Michèle Saint-Michel
📧 michelesaintmichel at gmail com
Bad Saturn Media
📧 badsaturnmedia at gmail com

The 5 Stages of Grief: A Gentle Reconsideration

The five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. Originally, they described the emotional process of people facing their own terminal diagnosis. Over time, the framework was adopted more broadly to explain how people grieve after loss.

A glimpse inside Grief is an Origami Swan, where visual poetry and ritual invite a soft approach to mourning and memory.

These stages are often interpreted as a linear path. But grief isn’t linear. It doesn’t unfold in tidy sequences. And it certainly doesn’t end once I’ve checked off a box labeled “healed” or "acceptance."

Many modern grief educators and therapists emphasize that these stages are not prescriptive. They aren't steps we must follow in order. Instead, they describe common experiences of grief—feelings that may come and go, overlap, or repeat.

But even these descriptions can sometimes feel limiting. In Grief is an Origami Swan, I suggest that grief is not a psychological riddle to solve, but a relational, embodied process. One shaped by memory, ritual, and creative care.

Here’s how I experience each stage, reframed through the lens of my own book, Grief is an Origami Swan:

1. Denial
Denial, to me, is a sacred pause. It's like folding the first paper swan—mechanical, slow, and detached—not because I don’t care, but because I need form before feeling. It’s a place where breath returns to the body.

2. Anger
Anger often arrives when my body remembers before my mind does. The rituals I practice give shape to that sensation. I let my grief be messy and defiant. A sharp crease in a delicate page. A shout into the folds. Anger doesn’t need to be feared; it needs to be witnessed.

3. Bargaining
I don’t see bargaining as futile. I see it as longing—for connection, for do-overs, for a different ending. My rituals don’t erase what happened, but create symbolic gestures that let me speak back to the silence. I fold an origami swan not to reverse time, but to hold time differently.

4. Depression
I don’t pathologize this stage. My sorrow is tender and poetic. It’s the ink soaking into handmade paper. The silence between lines. This isn’t a problem to fix—it’s a sacred presence. One that calls for stillness, breath, and gentle company.

5. Acceptance
To me, acceptance isn’t a tidy resolution. It’s a quiet ritual repeated. It’s remembering to light a candle on a certain day, or carrying a stone in my pocket. It’s folding another swan, not because I have to, but because it connects me to what was lost. Acceptance, here, is not closure—it’s continuity.

Grief as a Wave, Not a Ladder

The five stages can help name what I’m feeling. But they don’t capture the full complexity of grief. In truth, grief moves like a wave. It rises, falls, retreats, and returns. Some days, I’m flooded with emotion. Other days, the tide is quiet.

Instead of rushing to "complete" my grief, I try to make room for it. To listen. To soften around its edges. Grief is an Origami Swan reminds me that grief can be both ritual and rupture—folded gently into my life, one gesture at a time.

Resources for Gentle Grieving

If you're looking for compassionate tools for your grieving process, Grief is an Origami Swan offers a tender space of poetry, ritual, and art. You can learn more or order a copy here.

Now Shipping Worldwide: Between a Frame and a Soft Place

Zine as Somatic Archive

Edited by Michèle Saint-Michel | Published by Bad Saturn Media | In collaboration with Millennium Film Workshop

A Tactile Artifact from the 2025 Exhibition

We’re proud to announce the wider release of Between a Frame and a Soft Place, the official zine of the 2025 exhibition at Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. Carefully edited by Michèle Saint-Michel and published by Bad Saturn Media, this hand-bound zine is now available for purchase online.

Originally available only in person during the exhibition, this limited-edition zine is now being distributed globally to bring its intimate reflections to a broader audience.

Handmade, Meant to Be Held

This is a small-run, hand-numbered zine:
– 44 pages
– Hand-sewn with waxed linen thread
– Bound in translucent vellum

It is meant not just to be read, but held. It carries the weight of process. Like the exhibition it extends, it dwells in slowness, attention, and deep feeling. Printed in a small batch with care and intention, this zine is a tactile extension of the exhibition’s ideas—meant to be held, felt, and revisited.

🖤 Print Edition: $14 USD
💻 Digital Edition: Pay What You Can (Suggested: $5)

About the Zine

Curated as an intimate counterpoint to the gallery space, performances, and screenings, this zine explores how digital mediation reshapes our sense of reality. What happens when private experience becomes filtered through technological textures? What kind of intimacy survives in the digital blur?

This collection brings together artists and writers working at the edges of perception, grief, touch, and time. Through visual work, poetry, and prose, the zine holds space for both the ephemeral and the enduring—asking how we look, how we remember, and how we care.

Contributors

Contributors were invited to respond across form—writing, image, and poetic essay. Each artist brings forward their own interrogation of visibility, interiority, and trace.

Alexandra Mauriello, Andrea Hackl, Anton Lushankin, Christina Bauernfeind, Clara Chacón, Collette Rayner, Fran Hayes, Gabriela Milkova Robins, Gel Press, Ginny Darke, indexthumb, Jamie Yuan, Kevin Chen, Lauren Dana Smith, Maike Helbig, Matt McKinzie, Olivia Burgess, Rachel Sun E., Riley Tu, Riverstone, Vincent Katz, and Zara Joan Miller.

Order Now

💌 Print Edition – $14
Receive a hand-bound, vellum-covered, hand-numbered zine delivered directly to your door.
[Order the Print Edition →]

🌐 Digital Edition – Pay What You Can (Suggested $5)
Ideal for international readers and digital libraries.
[Download the Digital Edition →]

Why It Matters

This project reflects Bad Saturn Media’s ethos of care-full publishing—amplifying voices that engage with complexity and feeling. It also continues the mission of Millennium Film Workshop to support experimental practices through print, performance, and film.

Curator and Editor Michèle Saint-Michel brings together works that don’t shy away from difficult or delicate subjects—grief, rupture, dislocation—yet offer space for reflection, connection, and transformation.

Rooted in embodiment, memory, and digital mediation, this publication asks how intimacy is refracted through technological systems—and how grief, tenderness, and perceptual distortion remain present in our bodies long after the moment of capture.

Between a Frame and a Soft Place | Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel | Millennium Film Workshop

Between a Frame and a Soft Place

Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel | April 11–17, 2025 | Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn

Welcome to Between a Frame and a Soft Place, a weeklong hybrid exhibition hosted at Millennium Film Workshop, offering a multi-sensory journey into the digital body. Featuring film screenings, live performances, a poetry reading, a limited-edition zine, and a gallery installation, the exhibition bridges flesh and circuitry, memory and data.

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In the Gallery

Through stop-motion animation, voyeuristic projections, and embodied performance, the works invite the audience to engage with the tensions between intimacy and detachment, presence and absence. The artists in the gallery investigate how physical and digital remnants—ranging from childhood toys to fragmented video recordings—shape our understanding of self and the boundaries between the real and the virtual. These pieces challenge the act of looking, fragmenting perception and blurring the lines between memory, myth-making, and the evolving digital body.

On view April 11–17, 1–5 PM daily
Location: Millennium Film Workshop – 167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Gallery Installation Artists

Lisa Crafts (New York-based)

Chimeric Animated Portraits
Single channel looped animation projection, silent, 2017–2021.

Lisa Crafts is a visual artist working primarily in animation and moving image. Her interdisciplinary work explores environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity, and chaos, and has screened widely across Europe, Asia, and North America.

Sapphire Goss (UK-based)

Sapphire Goss works with moving image and photography to explore the fragility of time, place, and perception. Using analogue materials, sound, and organic processes, she creates ephemeral, otherworldly images—what she calls the “analogue uncanny”—that shimmer, decay, and evolve beyond the screen.

Audrey Coombe (New York-based)

The Game, 2019
Single channel looped video installation, black and white, silent, 2025.

Audrey Coombe is a video artist interested in occupying unexpected spaces with her work—such as public billboards—and questioning how individual and collective realities coexist or conflict. Drawing from metaphysics and exile, her work focuses on "peripheral realities" and shifting notions of privacy and possession.

Fiona Jacobson-Yang (New York-based)

Don'tgetridofit
Installation video on iPhone with figurines: digital HD, color, sound, 2024.

Fiona Jacobson-Yang is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, stop-motion animation, and the book arts. Based in Queens, she has exhibited in Boston, London, and New York. Her work draws from childhood memory and personal archives to animate intimate, sentimental objects—what she calls "digital tchotchkes"—into playful yet emotionally complex narratives.

Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas (Madrid-based)

hikisaku
16mm vertical film to HD, color, silent, 18fps, 4’, 2024.

Jorge is a filmmaker and artist whose practice explores temporality, embodiment, and poetics through analog and photochemical film. His recent accolades include the Fugas Award at Documenta Madrid (2024) and a solo exhibition at WIELS Contemporary Art Center. In the gallery, his film hikisaku unfolds a fragmented body across time and space, encouraging subjective projection and intimacy.

indexthumb (London-based)

A filmmaker and performance artist, indexthumb works through queer perceptual frameworks to explore the body’s entanglement with the screen. Centering their non-binary experience, they use movement, somatics, and multi-channel forms to navigate hybrid digital-physical spaces. Their work spans from underground bunker performances in Berlin to experimental film installations.

Madeline Rose Finkel (New York-based)

MIRADAS
Single channel video presented in 4:3, digital HD, color, sound, 2022.

An MFA candidate at NYU Tisch, Madeline Finkel blends documentary and poetic modes in her filmmaking. Her background in dance informs a visceral, observational approach to storytelling. A former Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, she’s been named one of “14 Filmmakers to Watch” by the British Council and One World Media.

Soo Hyun Lee (London-based)

Why are you doing this to yourself?
Single channel video presented in 4:3, digital HD, color, sound, 2024.

Soo Hyun Lee’s work traverses painting, performance, and video installation. With degrees from Goldsmiths and Korea University, her recent practice explores care—ranging from self-destruction to healing—through intimate character studies and drawn narratives. Her works have recently shown in Los Angeles, London, and Rome.

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Main Screening – Friday, April 11

Featuring moving image works by exhibiting artists alongside guest filmmakers.

The main screening gathers experimental films that navigate the shifting terrain between physical and digital bodies, grief and transformation, analog materiality and virtual presence. Through radically subjective perspectives and tactile formats—Super 8, VHS, 16mm, and 65mm—these works resist the disembodied logic of digital speed, reclaiming space for slowness, sensation, and softness.

From the analog embodiment of crip time in good appetite, to the haunted collapse of image-making in The Sight is a Wound, these films operate at the edges of legibility. Smoke and migrant flora move us into ritual, memory, and personal loss, while CROWN preserves diasporic identity through the textured intimacy of a Black barber shop. In Eclipse, language and presence drift through a screen’s interface, while With Eyes Open and Cat Overnight complicate femininity and performance within digital gazes.

Together, these films create a shared, immersive space of tenderness and resistance—one that invites the audience to linger between states, sensations, and selves.

Program 1

Parham Ghalamdar – *The Sight is a Wound* (06:49)

This film grapples with the limits of image-making in the face of unbearable human suffering. Through the burning of over 50 oil paintings and interwoven footage of violence and grief, the film exposes how images can fail to witness or carry the weight of atrocity. It’s both a protest and an elegy—where destruction becomes a radical form of creation.

Rana San – *migrant flora* (02:00)

A quiet visual poem about migration and home, told through eco-printed floral “time capsules.” The cyclical rhythms of immigration, memory, and movement surface gently—evoking a feeling of being perpetually in transit, always home and never quite.

Celune Acheampong – *Eclipse* (00:30)

A kinetic concrete poem exploring visibility and presence. A single phrase—“u can only see me in the dark”—drifts and rearranges across the screen, animated by digital waves. Sometimes “me” disappears entirely, challenging how and when we are seen.

Sara Wylie – *RESISTANCE MEDITATION* (04:59)

Shot on Super 8 and eco-processed by hand, this is a tactile meditation on chronic illness and crip time. It resists the productivity mandates of normative timekeeping, offering stillness, slowness, and self-determined rhythm as acts of resistance and care.

Dan Robert Lahiani – *Blueprint* (11:11)

A poetic interplay between the artist’s body and the decaying Clal Building in Jerusalem. As Lahiani undergoes osteopathic sessions, he also “treats” the building—mapping its injuries and trauma with care. The film becomes a ritual of mutual healing between man and structure.

Melissa Bruno – *With Eyes Open* (03:48)

A silent, 16mm color film presenting an intimate feminine moment. Wordless and minimal, it captures the quiet poetics of presence, gesture, and sensation in a space stripped of narrative but full of feeling.

Pierre Yves Clouin – *Maxillae* (02:19)

A playful, surreal study in consumption and embodiment. The artist's jaw (maxillae) becomes a stage for abstract choreography, teasing out a humorous yet uncanny tension between appetite, repetition, and identity.

Raphaël Bessette – *Ripe* (03:05)

A lush, hand-painted 16mm film-poem that explores transgender becoming as an ongoing, sensorial process. Nonlinear, cyclical, and visceral, the film offers ripeness as a metaphor for transformation outside binary narratives of transition.

Lili White – *The HOUSE of WATER* (05:15)

A gesture-based performance rooted in the *I Ching*’s Hexagram #29, “The Abysmal.” Using improvisational movement in nature, White invokes dream logic and body wisdom, proposing that like water, we must flow through danger and darkness without losing ourselves.

Jessica Parnell – *I Became a Cat Overnight* (01:00)

A humorous, uncanny performance piece that merges belief, transformation, and surveillance. The artist appears dressed as a cat in a real-life setting, blending digital absurdity with sincere embodiment—asking where play ends and reality begins.

Michèle St. Michel – *Inhale* (03:33)

*Inhale* engages with presence, absence, and the fluidity of identity. The work speaks to elements of vulnerability, sexuality, and self-representation in conversation with the work of film diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson and the self-portraits of artist Eleanor Antin. Music by Sam Carr.

Riley Tu – *Quantised Bits of Light* (09:15)

The work reimagines the creation of cyborgs within the digital landscape. The awakening cyborg responds with sarcastic movements when questioned by an enigmatic creator.

–– Intermission ––

Program 2

Denise Iris – *Sweetmeats* (04:34)

A mysterious fragment from a larger narrative that is never made clear becomes a meditation on illness and the transformative power of presence, rendered in a radically subjective style.

Myriam Rey – *absent landscapes* (10:31)

The rediscovery of a box of old home videos opens a dialogue around the processing and reprocessing of images. The textures of video, memory, and home unlock invisible histories, absorbed by and through the body.

Ima Iduozee – *Crown* (04:00)

Shot on 65mm, *Crown* centers a Black barbershop in Helsinki as a cultural sanctuary. A visually stunning meditation on community, hair, heritage, and belonging. Part of the *Diaspora Mixtapes* film series.

Andrea Hackl – *Moonlight* (04:20)

An ode to the primal interplay between light and shadow.

Désirée Jung – *The Cut* (03:12)

A film experiment on opening new spaces after the incision opens the body.

Noe Kidder – *A Paradise of Children* (03:13)

A private, hermetic film exploring intimate love and rejecting the digital in favor of the body and personal myth.

Catron Booker – *Fugitive Freedom Dreaming* (05:52)

A cinematic poem filmed at Fort Mose, the first free African settlement in the U.S. The performance centers Black Diasporic movement rituals as resistance, refuge, and restoration.

Erica Schreiner – *Smoke* (07:40)

**WORLD PREMIERE** A ritual of heartbreak and healing unfolds through burning pages and submerged tears. This visceral performance turns personal grief into cathartic release. Scored by Toby Goodshank.

Yue Hua – *Trace on my Body* (03:31)

A self-reflexive film about body acceptance following illness. Scars, skin, and voice are embraced through 16mm animation and hand-processed film. *Content warning: nudity*

Lauren Dana Smith – *V.I.S.T.A.* (05:32)

A cyborg responds with sarcasm to its enigmatic creator, reimagining the digital creation of cyborgs and identity within virtual spaces.

Péter Lichter – *The Geneva Mechanism: A Ghost Movie* (05:14)

The ghosts of celluloid haunt digital space in this abstract collage that deconstructs the film projection apparatus into ghostly remnants of cinema past.

Olivia Burgess – *Embodied Perception* (02:35)

A poetic performance that blends storytelling, dance, and sculptural elements to reclaim the disempowered body as a site of knowledge production.

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Performances – Saturday, April 12

Live Performers:

Jenna Caravello – _Air Shape Index_

Composer: Celia Hollander – 16:00

Jenna Caravello is a multimodal and interactive media artist from LA. Her work is motivated by love and loss, the identity politics of digital avatars, object-oriented hauntology, and social relationships across virtual forums. Working with animation and video game software, she makes experimental video games, interactive sculptural installations, short films, and mixed-reality performances that explore the role of fallible memory in personal, collective, and digital narratives. Caravello's work has been featured internationally, including at the Melbourne International Animation Festival, the National Taiwan Arts Education Center, the Raindance Film Festival, the GIRAF International Animation Festival, and Slamdance. She is the recipient of a 2018 Jules Engel Award from CalArts and a 2018 Princess Grace Award.

Mackenzie Rawls – _Impartenenza_

Dancers – 06:00

Brooklyn based performing artist, choreographer, and teacher. Mackenzie is a highly accomplished freelance dancer where her repertoire boasts a rich collection of notable works by Jose Limon, Bill T Jones, Thang Dao, Doug Varone, Karole Armitage, and Danny Burcazeski. She has also worked with esteemed choreographers such as Peter Chu, Darrell Grand Moultrie, & Ilana Goldman. She can be found performing with small local companies in the NYC area as a freelancer and is thrilled to debut this excerpt this month at the Fringe Festival.

Aleth Berenice – _Questioning Purity_

Dancer: Leya Gullström Matulessy – Composer: Sean Pett – 04:00

Aleth Berenice is an interdisciplinary artist whose work fuses dance, choreography, filmmaking, and teaching. She speaks 5 languages (English, Spanish, Norwegian, French & German). Her work has earned accolades such as Best Neo-Classical Choreography for Peripheral Perception (2024) and Best Film for Florence Dance on Screen, Messums Dance Film Festival (2023), and Puerto Rico Dance Film Festival (2024).

indexthumb – _Somadex_

20:00

indexthumb is a filmmaker and performance artist working with queer perceptual processes to investigate frame-based bodies and the growing entanglement between physical and virtual space. Centering their non-binary body as a queer site of investigation, they use contemporary movement improvisation and somatics to explore the errors, invisibilities, and hybrid spaces that emerge from our interactions with screens and images. They have presented their work in various forms, from multi-channel installations to films on Hollywood Boulevard, and underground Berlin bunker performances.

–– Intermission ––

Performance Screening:

Jocelyne Moreau – _Mathilde_ – 08:48

Mathilde is estranged from herself and her surroundings by a long-term illness. She is advised to go and live in the countryside for a while. One evening she comes out of her lethargy and has a breakthrough.

Tamryn Challenger – _The White Cube_ – 06:49

‘White Cube’ after Challenger’s poem of the same name.

Chanika Svetvilas – _Silent Screaming Siren_ – 05:14

The filmmaker utilizes her lived mental health experience of bipolar as the point of departure. Themes of transformation, incarceration, displacement, borders, agency, and hope show up in symbolic color and motifs and accompanied by spoken word.

Cheryl Pagurek – _here and there, now and then_ – 07:10

While interacting with Cheryl Pagurek’s ‘States of Being’ video and sound installation, dancers Rion Taylor and Wyeth Walker move fluidly through space and time. They traverse public and private locations, inhabit physical and virtual realms, and explore connections and relationships between the past, the present, and an uncertain future. Their movements unite black and white film footage with contemporary video recordings, while building a compelling soundscape with composer Jesse Stewart's music. Imagery of daily life gives way to hot and swirling climate maps, forging a continuum between here, there, now, and then.

Sarah ElMasry – _Carol_ – 05:00

A lone performer moves within a bright space, her gestures unfolding in a measured dialogue with a projected image. The film plays with perception, as shadows grow and distort, momentarily conjuring the illusion of multiple figures. The shifting interplay of light, body, and projection suggests an exploration of selfhood—perhaps a woman grappling with an inner aspect of herself or negotiating her presence in a public space. As the piece evolves, its static framing gives way to motion, altering the viewer’s spatial awareness and inviting a reconsideration of agency, duality, and embodiment.

Schuyler Dragoo – _Simulacra Goose_ – 03:20

_Simulacra Goose_ is an extension of Schuyler Dragoo’s ongoing project, Becoming a Goose, exploring the blurred boundaries between human, nonhuman, and artificial intelligence through speculative embodiment and AI collaboration. The performance merges Dragoo’s physical movements with AI-generated visuals that reinterpret human and nonhuman gestures, creating a surreal dialogue between the body, technology, and the speculative in-between.

Noah Rosa – _HAVEN_ – 02:43

Born out of the traditions of both experimental film and machinima, _HAVEN_ immerses the viewer in a sensory experience through hyperreal digital landscapes and textural sound design. The film explores the interplay between real and synthetic, experienced and imagined, using AI-generated imagery and field recordings to create an atmospheric blend of grace and violence.

Ellen Gilbert – _Freedom to Think_ – 15:00

_Freedom to Think_ (2023) is a self-recorded performance video set in a sterile, confining "human data bank," exploring the tension between autonomy and control in the digital age. The piece juxtaposes intimate, personal moments of contemplation with a cinematic manifesto to examine how technology commodifies thought and reshapes our inner lives. Through her dazzle makeup and graffiti-like questions, Gilbert critiques and resists surveillance capitalism, encouraging viewers to reclaim agency over their cognitive landscapes.

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Poetry Reading & Zine Release Event – Sunday, April 13

Limited-run poetry zine published by Bad Saturn Media launched alongside Michèle Saint-Michel’s artist film series in NYC.

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The zine, Between a Frame and a Soft Place (Bad Saturn), serves as a tactile extension of the exhibition, offering a more intimate, personal exploration of the themes presented in the gallery. Through a collection of essays, poetry, and visual pieces, it explores the complexities of memory, identity, embodiment, and the digital body. The works in the zine reflect on the shifting boundaries between physical and virtual spaces, drawing from personal recollections, sensory experiences, and fragmented narratives. The zine, much like the exhibition itself, interrogates how digital mediation distorts perception and how our intimate, private experiences are often captured and refracted through technology. With contributions from artists and writers who share a common interest in the spectral, the work becomes an exploration of both the ephemeral and the enduring, offering a lens through which the act of looking and being seen can be reimagined.

Reading by:
Vincent Katz, Kevin Chen, Jamie Yuan, Kate Mohanty, Lauren Dana Smith, Matt McKinzie, and Gabriela Michele.

Zine Contributors

Alexandra Mauriello

Alex Mauriello is an artist and designer whose work explores the intersections of nature, technology, and memory. With a background in visual design and research-based practice, their work examines how digital interfaces reshape perception and archival systems. Rooted in material experimentation, they use found objects, natural materials, and digital distortions to create pieces that blur the boundaries between organic and artificial systems. Their recent work investigates the idea of "natural data," treating landscapes and geological formations as information carriers. Mauriello has contributed to exhibitions and experimental publications that engage with speculative narratives and contemporary digital culture. @paper___organismo

Andrea Hackl

Andrea Hackl is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. While the human body is one main channel of her creative practice, she cherishes the alchemy of different disciplines. She is a poet, using different media to explore, create & express. Central themes to her work: transformational processes, empowerment, freedom and, often, the interconnection between our inner emotional and outer landscapes. Her performance project DREAMER has won the Award for Best Interdisciplinary Live Performance at Lensdans Festival Brussels. Her films are being presented at festivals world wide and have won awards for BEST EXPERIMENTAL / ART FILM or BEST VIDEO POETRY. www.andreahackl.com @andreahacklprojects

Anton Lushankin

Anton Lushankin is (visual) poet, writer, playwright and translator, born in Kyiv, Ukriane. Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War he resides in his hometown. His work appeared in multiple publications including TAB Journal, orangepeel, Cream City Review, Lenticular Lit and Teiresian. He has too many ideas to really be able to manage them properly, but currently he’s finishing M.Sc. in Architecture, while working on a closet musical “DIG!!! LAZARUS DIG!!!” (based on the eponymous album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), a memoir-in-essays about the Russo-Ukrainian War and a multitude of short stories.

Christina Bauernfeind

Christina Bauernfeind is an artistic researcher and performance artist based in Heidelberg, Germany. Their work explores identity, intersectional equality and the deconstruction of naturalized narratives through collaborative, site-specific, autobiographical performative practices. Based on academic studies in Philosophy, English Literature, Linguistics and Art Theory, with a focus on queer aesthetics, they work in longterm artistic research projects that find various multi-media hybrid formats in between pop and subcultures. For i am monster they have been collaborating with visual and media artist Hannah Uszball and sound artist Sebastian Horn.

Clara Chacón

Clara Chacón is Bolivian poet, illustrator and animator based in London. Her work revolves around human experience both tangible and intangible often using metaphor to explain circumstances. She has a Ba(hons) in Illustration Animation and a Master in Animation both from Kingston University. Instagram: @little_sayubu

Collette Rayner

Collette Rayner is an artist, writer, and lecturer working between Scotland and the Netherlands. Her practice moves fluidly between film, experimental animation, text, and drawing. She is currently the co-director of INN, a new residency space in rural Fife. Her work has been screened, published, and exhibited with Edge of Frame(London), Boundless Film Festival, Fetfilm (Stockholm), Macau Experimental Video Festival (Macau), The Royal Academy of Art (The Hague), 45th Parallel Literary Journal (Portland, USA), The Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), 3 137 (Athens), Two Queens (Leicester), Gutter Literary Journal (Glasgow), Hoax (London), Standpoint (London), and Collective (Edinburgh). www.colletterayner.com @collectte_call

Fran Hayes

Fran Hayes is an interdisciplinary artist working across 3D modelling & animating, installation, writing and sculpture. Her first solo show ‘Thick, Stretchy, Sticky Space’ was at IMT Gallery, London, from May to July 2024. Fran has exhibited locally and internationally, most recently in Itoshima, Japan, March 2025. Other significant exhibitions include a collaborative performance installation with Ika Schwander for Rooms Festival, Maastricht, The Netherlands, ‘through the eyes of a pigeon’ (2023) in Cape Town, South Africa, which she curated as well as exhibited in with Nick Rushton, and ‘The Way We Were Tenderly’ (2023), London, with Alice Palm.

Gabriela Milkova Robins

Gabriela Michele (Gabriela Milkova Robins) is a Macedonian poet and PhD candidate based in St Andrews, Scotland. She was the 2023 StAnza Poetry Festival Poet-in-Residence, supported by the Edwin Morgan Trust, holding the Translation Award. Her work has appeared in the AI Literary Review, Seedlings, The Ekphrastic Review, OKNO.MK, Diversity, and three Macedonian anthologies, among others. Her performances include features on UK radio “Supernova”, at StAnza, Hame-ish, Fill This Space, and Struga Poetry Evenings. Her visual poetry has featured at StAnza 2023 in her collaborative exhibition entitled “Peeking” and she was a featured artist in the off-page 24 visual poetry exhibition and the off-page Kallax 2025 StAnza exhibition. Her poem Yield first appeared in the AI Literary Review. @gabrielamilkovarobins

Gel Press

Gel Press is an archival experiment in ambiguity working around, through and underneath. Obsessed with things beyond comprehension, the project is a mirror of the synaptic relation of everything, existing in the world and to the world. I, we, my, our intention is to create a fluidity, an unblocking of trueness. Where everything is fluid and jittering at the same time. As long-time collaborators, we recognised our urge to wring out texture and sensation from language and therein lies the intent of the cosmology. Gel Press is co-founded by Georgia Bloom (@eventuallyswallowed, and Anouska Manion (@noo_noo_vibes).

Ginny Darke

Ginny Darke is a Welsh poet based in Bristol, U.K. She has been shortlisted for the Foyle Young Poets award and the Creative Futures award. Her work has been published with ‘Poetry Northern Ireland’, ‘Anthropocene’, ‘The Remnant Archive’ and ‘Ink, Sweat and Tears’. Instagram: @ginny.darke

indexthumb

indexthumb is a filmmaker and performance artist working with queer perceptual processes to investigate frame-based bodies and the growing entanglement between physical and virtual space. Centering their non-binary body as a queer site of investigation, they use contemporary movement improvisation and somatics to explore the errors, invisibilities, and hybrid spaces that emerge from our interactions with screens and images. They have presented their work as everything from multi-channel installations, to films on Hollywood Boulevard, to underground Berlin bunker performances. www.indexthumb.com @indexthumb

Jamie Yuan

Jamie Yuan is a multidiscliplinary artist currently studying at the University of the Art London. She explores different mediums in order to build worlds, such as design, painting, music, and writing. A thinker and storyteller at heart, she draws from the obscure and the esoteric. She aims to be bold and incisive, having just the right amount of irreverence for art’s ability to communicate and inform. Currently, she maintains her own multimedia project at ersatz-heart.com.

Kate Mohanty

Kate Mohanty is an avant-garde saxophonist based in Brooklyn and is a long time member of Brooklyn's DIY music scene. kate is avidly committed to the process of improvisation & collaboration. Disappear Here, Mohanty’s second solo effort, was released in October 2019 on friendship tapes. Kate’s albums are completely improvised upon recording. Mohanty's debut solo recording, The Double Image, was released via GP Stripes in April 2017. in addition to solo efforts, Kate has participated in a wide variety of artistic projects; including scoring short films, accompanying dance & theater performances, as well as appearing on numerous albums for a wide variety of music projects. In addition to music, kate is a writer and published a solo book of poetry entitled Back from Brooklyn in 2011.

Kevin Chen

Kevin Chen is a spoken word poet and video game programmer living in Brooklyn, New York, author of the 2017 IndieCade Award nominated visual novel Four Horsemen and narrative ghostwriter for many smartphone games. He has written and performed spoken word pieces at the SalON! experimental variety series at The Brick, Cuckoos Open Mic at SoHo Playhouse, and Easy Paradise at KGB Bar, among many others, in a performance career that has spanned well over a decade. He can be found on Instagram as @verticalblankinterrupt

Lauren Dana Smith

Lauren Dana Smith is a research-based multidisciplinary artist, writer and psychotherapist based in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s practice centers sculptural, digital, video and sound compositions to process land/body politics through a feminist lens. Her works have been presented nationally and internationally, most recently at the CICA Museum in South Korea and at the PASEO Project in New Mexico. Smith has published and presented widely on art psychotherapy, traumatology, pediatrics and palliative medicine. Smith is a co-founder of the Taos Abstract Artist Collective. She holds an MPS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a faculty member. @laurendanasmith

Maike Helbig

Maike Helbig, based in Hanover, has a long path as painter, expressionist, photographer, make-up artist and hair stylist and has been working as photographer in varied projects since 1994. Her ambition is to capture and show beauty; the aesthetic and proportion of everything. Every object is unique, if you desire to show this. She aims to present faces, bodies and all things in their maximum expressive power. She's producing campaigns, record covers, products, cultural events and society pictures and video projects.

Matt McKinzie

Matt McKinzie is a multimedia artist whose work encompasses writing, filmmaking, curation, archival research, and performance. He graduated from Emerson College in 2021 with a B.A. in Visual and Media Arts and a Minor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His films have screened at MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBTQ+ Film Festival, 8-Ball TV, and the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Matt has curated programs of film and video art that have screened in the U.S. and internationally at such venues as Spectacle Theater, Millennium Film Workshop, Mana Contemporary, and Cinema Catalunya.

Olivia Burgess

Olivia Burgess is an internationally acclaimed movement artist, filmmaker, and photographer. She holds a BFA in dance performance from Fordham University and the Ailey School and a Master’s in Interaction Design from UAL’s London College of Communication. She has performed alongside FKA Twigs, Beyoncé, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Olivia explores the human experience through staged installation, performance, dance, and video. She is currently deepening her movement practice through the study of somatic movement and Butoh. Her work has been showcased at Ars Electronica, Hypha Studios, Dances With Films NY, Fisheye Film Festival, Cine Paris Film Festival, New Renaissance Film Festival and Gallery Kollectiff.

Rachel Sun E.

Rachel Sun E. is a fine artist and graphic designer based in Brooklyn New York. Her aesthetics embrace storytelling, and themes of embodiment, myth, and empathy. She is currently working on a creative writing and mixed media project exploring feminine trinity philosophies, and is looking for collaborators.

Riley Tu

Riley Tu is a London-based artist working with moving image, music, and installation. Her practice explores body politics, self-representation, and algorithmic resistance in digital spaces, drawing on feminist theories. Through 3D animation, she sculpts bodies as sites of tension between internal experience and external control. Tu’s work has been shown internationally, including BFI Southbank, Oberhausen, and Salón ACME. She was nominated for Best Animation Short at New Renaissance Film Festival, is part of British Council International Touring Programme, and has received grants from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. She holds an MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. @riileytu

Riverstone (Yuying Song)

Riverstone (Yuying Song) is a London-based poet whose work draws deeply from personal experience, exploring connections between individuals and the universal themes of love and mystery. Her writing reflects her “wanderer” identity, navigating the space between two cultures and embracing a fluid, non-binary self-recognition that transcends traditional notions of male and female. Meanwhile, by reimagining mythologies and religions, she delves into the blurred lines between divinity and humanity, often situating her work in the liminal spaces of “in-between”—neither this nor that—where chaos becomes a creative force.

Vincent Katz

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator and musician. He has published several books of poetry, including the recent collection, DAFFODIL (2025). Vincent is currently writing a book about three artists — the poet and critic Edwin Denby, the photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, and the painter and printmaker Yvonne Jacquette — and how they lived together and supported each other, as well as a larger group of friends and artists, in order to make art. It is always challenging to make art; in our times ever more so. vincentkatz.net

Zara Joan Miller

Zara Joan Miller works across poetry, performance and film. Her work seeks to unravel boundaries between human and non-human nature, often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. Zara is the author of poetry collection BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo LP with cellist Ute Kanngießer (Reading Group 2023). Her work has been presented at Barbican Centre, Muse Gallery, Horse Hospital, Cafe OTO, In Vitro, Default Den Haag and has appeared in Fieldnotes journal, Motor Dance Journal, Hotel, MAP, Another Gaze and Worms Magazine. @zarajoanmiller

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About the Curator

Michèle Saint-Michel is an artist and curator working at the intersection of power, feminist ecologies, grief, and digital embodiment. Her practice spans experimental film, immersive installation, and interdisciplinary curatorial approaches that challenge form and perception. She has curated and exhibited internationally and is currently a film curator at Millennium Film Workshop.

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Stay Connected

Between a Frame and a Soft Place is one thread in a larger constellation of work by artist and curator Michèle Saint-Michel, exploring digital embodiment, grief, feminist ecologies, and care-full futures. If this experience moved you, consider supporting the ongoing work.

- Purchase a limited-edition copy of the zine, featuring original poetry, visual art, and behind-the-scenes artist insights

- Follow on Instagram or to explore more writing, curating, and moving image projects

Together, we can keep making space for experimental voices and care-full media.

Between a Frame and a Soft Place at Millennium Film Workshop

Between a Frame and a Soft Place takes place April 11-17 at Millennium Film Workshop, offering audiences a multi-sensory experience that bridges flesh and circuits, memory and data. Each element, from the moving images on screen to the spectral illusions within the space, explores how the body exists simultaneously within and beyond the frame. A limited number of zines will be available, providing deeper insights into the artists’ processes and the themes at the heart of the exhibition. The gallery exhibition remains on view April 14-17, from 1-5 PM at 167 Wilson Ave., Brooklyn, NY.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Between a Frame and a Soft Place: A Hybrid Exhibition Exploring the Digital Body

Brooklyn, NY — Millennium Film Workshop presents Between a Frame and a Soft Place, a week of events that examine the digital body, how it moves, morphs, and manifests across both tangible and intangible spaces. Taking place April 11-17 at Millennium Film Workshop, this hybrid exhibition unfolds across multiple forms: a traditional film screening, a gallery installation, a zine release and reading event, and a performance program. Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, these elements invite viewers to peer into a world where physical and digital realities collide, questioning where the human ends and the digital body begins.

Spanning film, performance, and installation, the exhibition explores how technology reconfigures identity and presence, proposing the body as an evolving assemblage shaped by digital interfaces, ecology, and shifting power structures.

Featured Artists and Events

The gallery installation features film works by Lisa Crafts, Sapphire Goss, Ellen Gilbert, Audrey Coombe, Fiona Jacobson-Yang, Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas, indexthumb, Madeline Rose Finkel, and Soo Hyun Lee.

The screening program showcases films from international artist filmmakers alongside works from the London-based Digital Bodies Collective, presenting an array of perspectives on embodiment, representation, and identity in the age of infinite screens. Featured artists include Andrea Hackl, Catron Booker, Celune Acheampong, Dan Robert Lahiani, Denise Iris, Désirée Jung, Erica Schreiner, Ima Iduozee, Jessica Parnell, Lauren Dana Smith, Lili White, Melissa Bruno, Myriam Rey, Noe Kidder, Olivia Burgess, Parham Ghalamdar, Péter Lichter, Pierre Yves Clouin, Rana San, Raphaël Bessette, Riley Tu, Sara Wylie, and Yue Hua.

The second night of performances features a live audiovisual performance by LA-based artist Jenna Caravello, a durational piece by London-based performance artist indexthumb, choreography by London-based choreographer Aleth Berenice, and Brooklyn-based movement artist Mackenzie Rawls. The evening also includes five performance films that further blur the lines between the physical and the digital, including work by Chanika Svetvilas, Cheryl Pagurek, Jocelyne Moreau, Noah Rosa, Sarah ElMasry, Tamsyn Challenger, and Schuyler Dragoo.

On the exhibition’s third day, a limited-edition zine created exclusively for Between a Frame and a Soft Place and released by Bad Saturn Media will be officially launched. The zine features visual art and poetry from more than 20 poets, artists, and writers. The event includes a special poetry reading by Vincent Katz, Kate Mohanty, Kevin Chen, Matt McKinzie, Jaime Yuan, and others. The zine includes work by Alexandra Mauriello, Andrea Hackl, Anton Lushankin, Christina Bauernfeind, Clara Chacón, Collette Rayner, Fran Hayes, Gabriela Milkova Robins, Gel Press, Ginny Darke, indexthumb, Jamie Yuan, Kevin Chen, Lauren Dana Smith, Maike Helbig, Matt McKinzie, Olivia Burgess, Rachel Sun E., Riley Tu, Riverstone, Vincent Katz, and Zara Joan Miller.

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About the Curator

Michèle Saint-Michel is an artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and the intersections of grief, longing, and digital embodiment. Saint-Michel has curated and exhibited internationally, crafting spaces where moving images become sites of intimacy, resistance, and transformation. Her curatorial practice foregrounds experimental film, immersive installation, and the ways technology reshapes identity and presence.

About Millennium Film Workshop

Since 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of the experimental film movement, offering resources, workshops, and screening opportunities to filmmakers pushing the boundaries of cinema. Building on its storied history, Millennium continues to cultivate powerful new voices in independent film and remains an influential hub for creative collaboration.

About Bad Saturn Media

Bad Saturn Media is an independent publishing and arts platform dedicated to amplifying experimental voices in literature, visual art, and beyond. With a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, Bad Saturn supports artists who challenge form and convention, creating space for radical storytelling and aesthetic exploration. From artist books to critical essays, hybrid zines to experimental music, the press fosters projects that exist at the margins of traditional publishing, building a more care-full world.

Join us as we step into the liminal space between a frame and a soft place, where the screen not only frames our perception but dissolves into the shifting terrain of our digital bodies.

How the Theft of a Book Led to a Mission of Healing and Community Impact

Dear readers,

For me, as an author and artist, Grief is an Origami Swan has always been a deeply personal journey. After the loss of my father, quickly followed by the loss of my dear friend to metastatic breast cancer, I realized I had more grief than I knew what to do with—it was everywhere I looked and often I didn’t know how to address the cloud hovering just out of sight. This is when the practice of folding origami became vital to holding space for the complicated and often contradictory feelings that grief often stirred up in me. What started as a way for me to process my own grief grew into a mission to help others find solace in their most difficult moments. 

After Grief is an Origami Swan was released in 2020, I made sure it found a home in the public libraries of my small river town. When I visited, I’d slip a few sheets of origami paper between its pages, a quiet offering.

On my last trip home, I went to the Main Library to visit the book, but it wasn’t where it should have been, nestled in the 811s. The librarian and I searched—checked the system, combed the shelves—but the book was simply gone.

At first, I felt its absence like a small wound, a flicker of anger at the theft. But then, the librarian, knowing the book’s weight, its reach, offered a different perspective. “The person who took it,” they said, “must’ve really needed it.”

And then the loss became something else, proof of its necessity.

That moment at the library sparked an idea, one that now drives this campaign: getting more copies of Grief is an Origami Swan into public libraries across the U.S. By donating a book, you’re ensuring that people who need it most have access to its pages.

Every book donated brings us closer to our ambitious goal of 100 library copies. Thank you for your generosity.

Yours in grief and origami,

Every donation to this campaign helps Grief is an Origami Swan become available in more libraries, offering readers a place to process their grief and find solace in the beauty of nature and poetic reflection.

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A Mission to Make Grief Support Accessible

Public libraries are sanctuaries—places where people seek knowledge, solace, and healing. But too often, books on grief and loss aren’t widely available.

With your help, we’re changing that.

📖 For every 10 books sold, Bad Saturn donates 1 to a public library.
📚 Every $20 donated places a copy directly into a library.

• By donating to the campaign, you are not just buying a book—you’re making an investment in someone’s healing process.

• Public libraries are crucial spaces where people from all walks of life come to learn, heal, and grow. Your donation ensures that Grief is an Origami Swan is available to those who need it most.

• Every $20 donated directly places one copy in a library.

The theft was a surprising reminder of how essential it is to have accessible resources for grief in public spaces. Let’s make sure no one has to steal a book for the comfort it brings—let’s put it in every library.

Walk around inside the pages of Grief is an Origami Swan. A black-and-white world of flightless birds where befriending your grief is possible.

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Buy A Copy

For every 10 books sold, Bad Saturn donates 1 to a public library. Your support not only helps sustain this work but also ensures more people have access to it.

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Check our Progress - April Books Donation Board

Grief is an Origami Swan Launches Spring Donation Campaign to Bring Healing Books to Public Libraries

For every 10 copies sold, one is donated to a public library—plus, supporters can donate books directly for as little as $16.

[Brooklyn, NY] – Author and artist Michèle Saint-Michel, known for her poetic works on grief and healing, is launching a book donation campaign this April. The inspiration? A deeply personal moment when Grief is an Origami Swan, her illustrated guide to navigating grief, was stolen from the public library in the town where she grew up. This act sparked a commitment to get the book into the hands of those who need it most.

“When I learned of the theft, the librarian there was quite frank and said, ‘They must’ve truly needed your book.’ That’s why I see the theft as a call to action to get the work in more public libraries,” said Saint-Michel.

Every 10 copies of Grief is an Origami Swan sold in April will result in one book donated to a public library, making this healing resource accessible to communities everywhere. And for those who want to give directly, a $16 donation covers the cost of printing and shipping a book to a library in need.

How to Get Involved

Buy on Amazon

Spring Goal: Donate 100+ books to public libraries across the country.

Want to learn more about why your donation matters so much?

Read the story of how Grief is an Origami Swan made its way to the libraries we’re working to support.

Open Call: Between a Frame and a Soft Place

OPEN CALL: “Between a Frame and a Soft Place”
Curated by Michèle St. Michel with Guest Deep Reader Curator Ari-Duong Nguyen
Exhibition & Screening: April 11–17, 2025 at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Submission Deadline: Friday, February 28, 2025 at 5pm
Notifications: March 14, 2025

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

Now Accepting Proposals:

• Short Film & Video Art (Up to 13 min)

• Installation, Wall-mounted Visual Work, Sculptural Work 

• Sound / Performance (Live or pre-recorded)

• Zine Contributions (poetry, prose, artwork)

Join members of the London-based Digital Bodies Collective and other New York-based artists for a group exhibition featuring short films, performances, sculptural installations, and a special zine release. "Between a Frame and a Soft Place" is a group exhibition of time-based works, performance, and immersive installations that meditate on the concept of the digital body, and how it moves, morphs, and manifests in both tangible and intangible realms. The exhibition bridges film screenings, gallery installation, experimental publishing, and performance, inviting visitors into the cracks where spillage and glitching of physical and digital realities can be glimpsed.

Through this hybrid format, the show examines how technology reconfigures identity and presence, prompting us to consider where the human ends and the digital body begins. In this liminal space, the body becomes an evolving assemblage, shaped by ecology, power structures, and the screens we inhabit.

Seeking submissions that explore:

• Embodiment & identity: How digital interfaces reconfigure our sense of self

• Techno [trans]formations: Emerging tech reshaping human interaction

• Memoria & myth-making: Personal or collective narratives in a screen-saturated age

• The spectral & sensory: Immersive or experimental works that blur the line between data and flesh

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

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About

For over fifty years, Millennium Film Workshop has served as a world renowned center for independent experimental film production and exhibition.

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, curator, and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. She works around issues of power, feminist ecologies, and somatic memory. Her latest co-curated event was a sold-out screening in NYC, featuring 65 local and international filmmakers. Letters of Intent (LOI) available for international artists. All encouraged to apply.

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Key Dates

• Submission Deadline: Friday, February 28, 2025 at 5pm

• Notification of Acceptance: March 14, 2025

• PV, Opening & Main Screening: Friday, April 11, 2025 at 8pm

• Sound / Performance Events: Saturday, April 12 - April 17, 2025

• Zine Release & Reading Event: Sunday, April 13, 2025

• Gallery Exhibition: April 11–17, 2025

• Deinstall: April 18, 2025

Link to submit: https://forms.gle/1fmUkyS1jbdp2Ne36

Millennium Film Workshop Celebrates Overwhelming Success of "The Poetic Lens" Screening

Saint-Michel addresses the standing-room-only crowd at Brooklyn’s Millennium Film Workshop

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Global Audience Joins In-Person and Online to Experience 65 Poetry Films Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel and Erica Schreiner

BROOKLYN, NY – Millennium Film Workshop is proud to announce the resounding success of The Poetic Lens, a magnetic poetry film showcase curated by artists Michèle Saint-Michel and Erica Schreiner, which took place on January 18, 2025 at the organization’s storied Brooklyn space. The event drew a sold-out crowd for its in-person screening and an enthusiastic international audience via live simulcast.

From a record-setting 750 submissions, the curators assembled an eclectic 2.5-hour main program of 35 standout works, with an additional 30 films displayed in a dedicated Gallery space. The selected films seamlessly merged poetry and experimental moving images, transporting viewers into a dreamlike cinematic journey at the intersection of literature, performance, and contemporary art.

“Every film spoke to the power of visual poetry, from its surreal landscapes to heartfelt narratives,” curator Michèle Saint-Michel added. “I’m thrilled we had such a vibrant turnout and shared my love for this intersection of film, performance, and verse with people from around the world.”

About the Curators

• Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker and intermedia artist who creates work centered on power dynamics, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and quantum mechanics. An international festival and gallery exhibitor, she has authored four books, leads the Artists’ Film Club community, and serves on the curatorial staff at Millennium Film Workshop.

• Erica Schreiner is a New York–based video and performance artist who harnesses VHS to craft allegorical, ethereal pieces. Through found-object manipulation and elaborate set-building, her surreal films delve into femininity, anarchistic themes, and ritual. Her works have exhibited at MoMA, MoMA PS1, SHOWstudio, and Hugh Lane Gallery.

Event Highlights

• Date & Time: January 18, 2025, at 8:00pm (doors at 7:30pm)

• Location: Millennium Film Workshop, 167 Wilson Ave., Brooklyn, NY

• Attendance: Sold-out in-person crowd plus a robust virtual audience via simulcast

• Program: 35 selected films in the main showcase and 30 additional works featured in the Gallery

• Proceeds supporting Millennium’s continued mission of fostering experimental cinema

About Millennium Film Workshop

Established in 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has championed experimental film by providing resources, workshops, and screening opportunities to avant-garde filmmakers. With a rich history of nurturing independent voices, Millennium remains a vital hub for creative collaboration and cutting-edge film culture.

Michèle Saint-Michel Co-Curates The Poetic Lens at Millennium Film Workshop

Brooklyn, NY — Curator and poetry filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel and renowned performance artist and film diarist Erica Schreiner are thrilled to announce an open call for The Poetic Lens, a curated screening of poetry films to be held in 2025 at the iconic Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, NY. Submissions are open now through December 10, 2024, with free entry for artists worldwide.

“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.” — Derek Walcott

The Poetic Lens promises to be an extraordinary evening celebrating the synergy of poetry and filmmaking. The event will explore the vast possibilities of the poetry film genre, showcasing works that traverse boundaries and defy categorization. From poems read aloud on film to cinematic poetry, kinetic typography, soundscapes, visual poetics, and abstract experimentation, the screening aims to ignite dialogue about the genre’s fluidity and creative potential.

With The Poetic Lens, Saint-Michel and Schreiner bring their shared vision of championing innovation and boundary-pushing artistry to the Millennium Film Workshop, a historic space long known for nurturing experimental and independent film. This partnership has already inspired hundreds of submissions, setting the stage for a groundbreaking celebration of the poetic image.

Key Details:

• Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, December 10, 2024

• Submission fees: Free

• Eligibility: Open to all artists, regardless of location

• Submit

This event invites creators to embrace and redefine the poetry film genre, contributing to a vibrant discourse that blends visual and literary artistry.

About the Curators:
Michèle Saint-Michel is a poet and filmmaker whose work explores themes of grief, longing, and feminist ecologies. With an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image and two published poetry collections, her innovative approach has been celebrated internationally. Erica Schreiner is a trailblazing experimental filmmaker whose work has been showcased in galleries and festivals worldwide, known for her intimate and evocative style.

Join us for a night where poetry and film converge, and the boundaries of storytelling dissolve into the sublime.

Goldsmiths students provide sneak peek ahead of degree show

Graduating artists from the world-leading Fine Art programme will showcase their work at the annual Degree Shows this week, celebrating the best of creativity at Goldsmiths. 

MICHÈLE SAINT-MICHEL. 21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body, 2024. 16mm, hand-processed B&W film, digitally scanned with digital HD video; Stereo sound; Colour; 23m01s. Installation view, Laurie Grove Baths, South London, New Cross, UK. Photo credit: Hanna Moon

Goldsmiths MFA programme that honed the talents of artists such as Damien Hurst and Sarah Lucas, will join student artists studying for the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, the MA Art & Ecology and Graduate Diploma in Art programmes. In all some 120 artists work will be on display.

Opening on 11 July the five-day Postgraduate degree show will bring together the work of students from the UK, China, South Korea, Egypt, Bangladesh, Romania, the USA.