What does it mean to put your body—your real, pulsing, breakable body—on the line?
Promotional image for “Skin in the Game,” a two-day program of experimental film, performance, and poetry curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn (October 24–25, 2025).
Skin in the Game was a two-day program of screenings, performances, and a group exhibition curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, filmmaker and film curator. Presented at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, the event gathered twenty-one international artists, filmmakers, and poets exploring the body as archive, threshold, and offering.
Bringing together experimental film, sound, performance, poetry, and sculpture, the program asked how art might hold space for vulnerability, resistance, and repair. The works examined embodiment as both a political act and a site of intimate knowing, where sensation becomes story, and care becomes form.
Friday, October 24 — Gallery Opening & Experimental Film Screening
The first night of Skin in the Game opened with a gallery reception and film screening (also simulcast online). The exhibition featured works by Audrey Coombe, Charlotte Cooper, Jess Challis, Kondo, Marwa Eltahir, and Tim Feeney, alongside a curated program of experimental films exploring contact, risk, and embodied memory.
About the Film Program
The films gathered for Skin in the Game bring us into proximity with the body, its pulse, its thresholds, its ways of knowing. Across documentary, poetry, and experimental form, these works move through sensation and risk, asking what it means to carry memory in skin, to film from inside feeling, to translate touch into light.
From Luiza Parvu’s intergenerational dialogue on womanhood and migration to Tempest Creation’s trans-speculative fabulation, the program traced a continuum of embodiment where tenderness meets endurance, and vulnerability becomes a mode of power. Each filmmaker turned their gaze inward and outward at once, locating the body as both document and instrument, boundary and bridge.
Program Lineup
Luiza Parvu – Eggshells – 11:40
Arielle Estrada – Pellicula – 3:34
Billy Palumbo – Write Your Sunlight on My Skin – 3:41
Dominic Angerame – A Small Fragment of a Day That Belongs to 20 Years Ago – 7:30
Arun Sood – An Da Shealladh – 4:08
Tempest Creation – Birth of the Hive Queen – 8:43
Anne Whitehurst / Mike Stubbs – Denial – 6:00
Intermission
Lynne Sachs – Girl in a Daunting Now – 3:00
Matt McKinzie – Embryonic Journey – 4:43
Delfin Lev & Sebastián Vásquez Cipriani – Waking Theory – 9:09
Mahda Purmehdi – Noli Me Tangere – 4:29
Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung – Blessed Are Those Who Grieve – 14:20
Julia Brown – Birds Talk to Humans All the Time – 4:31
Saturday, October 25 — Poetry, Performance, and Somatic Acts of Witnessing
The second night began in language and ended in body, unfolding as a descent from reading to ritual.
Lottie McCrindell opened the evening with a reading of new poems that weave together fashion, textile, and touch, illuminating how materials can remember tenderness. Her poetry attends to the fine seams between beauty and labor, art and care.
Jess Challis, whose artist book body less was featured in the gallery, followed with readings from her new chapbook. Her work merges poetry and visual art, exploring absence, witness, and the ghostly contours of embodiment.
Saskia Globig’s performance millions of billions then pushed the boundaries of intimacy and exposure. Engaging the audience through acts that blurred the line between private and public gesture, she turned bodily function into ritual, transforming what is often hidden into a mirror of shared vulnerability. The performance asked what it means for the body to carry both pollution and possibility, how fluids, plastics, and emotion circulate through us as shared matter.
Saskia Globig performing “millions of billions” at Skin in the Game, an exhibition curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop (Brooklyn, 2025). The performance transformed private acts into ritual, confronting intimacy, ecology, and the porous boundaries of the body.
Closing the night, Tim Feeney performed Dowsing, a meditation on deep time and endurance. Through sound and exertion, Feeney placed his body within an imagined landscape of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland, exploring care, decay, and connection across geological time. His performance unfolded as both an act of listening and a gesture of persistence.
Tim Feeney performing “Dowsing” at Skin in the Game, an exhibition curated by Michèle Saint-Michel at Millennium Film Workshop (Brooklyn, 2025). The work used sound and physical endurance to explore care, decay, and the body’s relationship to time and terrain.
The evening concluded with the release of a Bad Saturn Media risograph poetry leaflet featuring new work by Lottie McCrindell and Ryan Hooper. McCrindell’s poems extended her interest in collaborative fashion writing, while Hooper’s contribution reflected on chronic illness, collective trauma, and ecological grief through prose, sound, and collage.
Participating Artists
Audrey Coombe, Charlotte Cooper, Jess Challis, Kondo, Marwa Eltahir, Tim Feeney, Arielle Estrada, Arun Sood, Billy Palumbo, Delfin Lev & Sebastián Vásquez Cipriani, Dominic Angerame, Julia Brown, Luiza Parvu, Lynne Sachs, Mahda Purmehdi, Matt McKinzie, Mike Stubbs and Anne Whitehurst, Tempest Creation, Zora Arose Ritz, Evgenia Chetvertkova, Kayu Yeung, Saskia Globig, Lottie McCrindell, and Ryan Hooper.
About the Curator
Michèle Saint-Michel is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, curator, and creative director based in New York. Her curatorial practice spans film, performance, and publication, often exploring embodiment, intimacy, and care as resistant forms. Through her work with Millennium Film Workshop, Bad Saturn Media, and Studio Saint-Michel, she creates immersive environments that merge poetic inquiry with rigorous production design.
Michèle also leads 1:1 creative direction sessions and teaches her signature Poetry Film Course, guiding artists and filmmakers to develop deeply personal, conceptually rich projects that bridge experimental cinema and the poetics of touch.
About Millennium Film Workshop
Founded in 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of New York’s experimental film community for nearly six decades. As both a screening venue and a hub for independent creators, Millennium has fostered generations of artists pushing the boundaries of the moving image.
About Bad Saturn Media
Founded in 2020 by Michèle Saint-Michel, Bad Saturn Media is a small press and publishing initiative dedicated to experimental books, poetry collections, and collaborative zines for a more care-full world. Bad Saturn releases projects that merge visual art, writing, and sound to reimagine intimacy and attention as political acts.
Event Details
Dates: October 24–25, 2025
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, 167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Curator: Michèle Saint-Michel
Program: Two-day screening series (in-person and simulcast), gallery exhibition, live performances, and poetry leaflet release.
Artists: 21 international artists, filmmakers, and poets.
Press & Contact
For interviews, images, or collaboration inquiries:
Michèle Saint-Michel
Curator, Skin in the Game
michelesaintmichel@gmail.com
Follow Michèle on Instagram for updates on upcoming exhibitions, filmmaking workshops, and creative mentorship opportunities.