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.
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.
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.Performances – Saturday, April 12
Live Performers:
Jenna Caravello – _Air Shape Index_
Composer: Celia Hollander – 16:00Jenna 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 – 06:00Brooklyn 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 – 04:00Aleth 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_
20:00indexthumb 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.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.
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___organismoAndrea 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 @andreahacklprojectsAnton 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_sayubuCollette 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_callFran 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. @gabrielamilkovarobinsGel 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.darkeindexthumb
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 @indexthumbJamie 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 @verticalblankinterruptLauren 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. @laurendanasmithMaike 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. @riileytuRiverstone (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.netZara 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. @zarajoanmillerAbout 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.
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.