Skin in the Game: A Two-Day Celebration of Experimental Film, Performance, and Poetic Embodiment

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.

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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.

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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.

Desire & Dystopia: The Personal Cinema of Lisa Crafts

Desire & Dystopia: The Personal Cinema of Lisa Crafts
Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel
September 12, 2025, 7:30PM (Doors)
Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: https://www.millenniumfilm.org/event-details/personal-cinema-lisa-crafts

Millennium Film Workshop is proud to present Desire & Dystopia: The Personal Cinema of Lisa Crafts, a rare evening devoted to the films and animated works of visionary artist Lisa Crafts. Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, the program surveys nearly five decades of groundbreaking work that spans erotic cel animation, ecological poetics, and multidisciplinary experiments in moving image.

From her infamous 1979 debut Desire Pie, a bold erotic cartoon seized by Cambridge police the very day it opened, now housed in the Museum of Modern Art, to her most recent animated installations exploring environmental precarity, Crafts has continually redefined the very language of animation. Her practice refuses boundaries: cel and cut-out animation, live performance collaborations, installations, and hybrid works that blur still life, landscape, and dream worlds. The result is a cinema that is as sensual as it is dystopian, where humor coexists with chaos, beauty with collapse, and desire is a profound expression of liberation.

Saint-Michel writes: Lisa Crafts’ work is fiercely personal yet insistently collective. She reveals not only the erotic and the catastrophic, but the fragile threads of resilience in between. These films feel simultaneously like missives from a lover and dispatches from another dimension where imagination is a survival tactic and intimacy is a common tongue.

Crafts’ career includes animated contributions to Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and independent documentaries, yet it is her independent work, darkly poetic, richly rendered, and quietly subversive, that has established her as a singular figure in the history of experimental animation. A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and professor emerita at Pratt Institute, her films and installations have screened worldwide, from Europe and Asia to galleries and festivals across North America.

Event Details
Date: Friday, September 12, 2025
Time: 7:30 PM (Doors)
Location: Millennium Film Workshop
167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237

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About Lisa Crafts

Lisa Crafts is an animator and moving image artist whose multidisciplinary work is characterized by richly rendered images, a dark poetics, and quiet wry humor. Themes explored include environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity and chaos.

The work has changed form to fit each project. Her earliest work, Desire Pie, is an unabashedly explicit erotic cel (cartoon) animation. The day it opened, the theater was closed down by the Cambridge, MA. police. Desire Pie now resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Glass Gardens is a black and white cut-out animation film about the role creativity plays in the survival of the human spirit. After drawing the artwork, Crafts built her animation stand to be able to film it, a bit like building one’s own car. The Octopus’s Exultation was a one-hour live music/animation performance in collaboration with composer Caleb Sampson.

For the past 15 years, her work has focused on questions surrounding the environmental crisis. Blending animation, video, photos, drawing and sculpture, her work inhabits the blur between what is seen and what is imagined. The work is structured in the form of animated still lifes, landscapes and portraits. Her current work, Drive-In Movie for Leaf Litter is an animated installation that pulls us into the fecund and mysterious world of the forest floor and the precarity of this ecological and political moment.

Crafts’ work has screened in festivals, theaters, galleries and museums in Europe, Asia, and throughout North America. In addition to her independent work, she created animated segments for Sesame Street and The Electric Company; and has animated dreams, memories and hallucinations for many independent documentaries.

Over the years, Crafts has had a side practice of practice of drawing and painting. Her current drawings are Stainboys, pareidolic portraits of perceived creatures that seep up to the sidewalk.

She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and MacDowell.

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About Michèle Saint-Michel

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, poet, and curator whose work explores power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and the poetics of care. Her films and interdisciplinary projects have screened and exhibited internationally at venues including Hypha Studios, Cubitt Artists, APT Gallery, Prismatic Ground Festival, Derapage, Lumifest, Fisura International Festival, and Maysles Documentary Center. She is the founder of Bad Saturn Media and curator at Millennium Film Workshop, where she develops large-scale exhibitions and multi-author publications. Her recent projects include Grief is an Origami Swan: An Artbook on Grief and Quantum Intimacies, an exhibition on embodiment and resistance. Saint-Michel holds an MA in Artists’ Film & Moving Image (distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is based in New York City.

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About Millennium Film Workshop

Founded in 1966 by filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of New York’s experimental film community for nearly six decades. Through low-cost equipment rentals, workshops, screenings, and its influential Millennium Film Journal, Millennium has supported generations of independent filmmakers. From early programs with artists like Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich, and Todd Haynes to ongoing exhibitions in its new Brooklyn home, Millennium remains dedicated to expanding access to the tools and ideas of non-commercial cinema.

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

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

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.

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

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.