Participants

The Seminar leader

Linda Chiu-han Lai, Known for her work in intermedia arts and media archaeology, Hong Kong-based transdisciplinary artist, curator and scholar Linda Chiu-han Lai brings her videography, experimental arts and pedagogy to the Oberhausen Seminar. Central to Lai’s works is her historiographic experiments, especially the moving image’s power to work against grand narratives and “central conflict” assumptions.
Lai’s works have been presented in Oberhausen’s International Competition in 2005, 2010 and 2011. Solo retrospective-screenings of her short videos were presented at the Experimental Film/Video Festival Macao (2015), Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul (2017), Centro de Creación Contemporanea de Andalucia (Cordoba, 2021) and the LSK School of Creativity (Hong Kong, 2025). Her large-scale installation works began in the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012-13); since then, she has had three solo shows of her site-specific installations. Lai is also the founder of the new media art group Writing Machine Collective (2004) and the participatory art initiative The Floating Projects (2015). Until 2023, she taught at the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong.
She was awarded Artist of the Year (Media Art) 2017 by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, her project D-Normal/V-Essay (on-line video zine) with the Floating Projects Collective was a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists)” 2022.

Website:http://lindalai-floatingsite.com/content/content.html
Instagram: @lindafpc

The Seminar participants

Leonardo Severino is an independent filmmaker, more a pixel-maker, based in Rome. He graduated in Drama, Art and Music Studies (DAMS) from the University of Bologna and worked as assistant director on national and international sets. Winner of Occhi sul Lago 2025 at CortoLovere International Short Film Festival, his short films Bianca (2023 Catania Film Fest premiere), Shapeless (2025 Ithaca Experimental), untld_myselfastheoldercalculator (2026 Ithaca Experimental) explore identity and memory through poetic minimalism blending fiction, MiniDV found footage, machinima docs. Screened at festivals/exhibitions in Italy, France, Bulgaria, India, Russia, Ukraine, USA, Argentina. Passionate about handycam tapes and analog oblivion, inspired by fragile archives and lo-fi virtual worlds. Curious and hybrid.

Website: www.leonardoseverino.com/
Instagram: @leonardo.severino_

Tharaka Sriram is a film programmer and curator working across international film festivals and cultural institutions. Her work centers on world cinema and genre film, with a focus on discovering and championing marginal, overlooked, and formally daring voices for international audiences.
She is particularly drawn to films that challenge dominant narratives, disrupt visual conventions, and engage audiences through risk, tension, and ambiguity—especially in horror, animation, and stop-motion. With extensive experience in film selection and audience engagement, she brings a strong understanding of how culturally specific and formally distinctive works can resonate across contexts and reach diverse audiences.
She collaborates with film festivals including Southern Lights on Tour at DFF – Deutsches Filminstitute & Filmmuseum Frankfurt, Lusofest Offenbach, Lichter Filmfest Frankfurt International, Lund Fantastic Film Festival Sweden, Hawai'i International Film Festival Honolulu, Diversity in Cannes Short Film & Webseries Showcase France, and Phare International Film Festival Mauritius.
Her curatorial perspective is shaped by a background in linguistics and political science, as well as over two decades of experience in human rights and marine conservation. She is a Blue Parks Ambassador with the Marine Conservation Institute and founder of Ocean Education, a marine literacy initiative.
As an artist who has been painting and collecting art since the age of 13, she draws inspiration from Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and Surrealism, with a focus on artists such as Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Zdzisław Beksiński, and H.R. Giger.

Website: www.tharakasriram.com
Instagram: @OE_OceanEducation

Kinchoi Lam is an artist, lecturer, and visual storyteller based in Hong Kong. He graduated from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong and later earned a master’s degree in Children’s Book Illustration from Anglia Ruskin University. Lam began his career as a storyteller in 2016 and has since published ten picture books in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.
His work has received multiple recognitions: he won the Batsford Prize in 2021, was shortlisted for the World Illustration Awards and the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition in 2020, and won the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition in 2026. “Journey to Mars” was selected for The White Ravens 2022. “The Playground of Little Jumbo” was included on the BRAW Amazing Bookshelf for the BolognaRagazzi Award 2025 and received the Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award 2025.
Lam’s research is centered on how visual storytelling—through picture books, photography, and film—can reflect and preserve local culture. He is particularly passionate about children's literature.

Sousana Maragkou is a Greek-born, New York-based director and RIFF Talent Lab alumna. Trained at Stavrakos Film School, her awarded debut short Crying Applause is featured in The NY Film-Makers' Coop. Her second short, The Law of Series, recently wrapped. Sousana weaves together the political and the personal, crafting stories that linger and challenge assumptions. Her work delves into existentialism, exploring the complexities and dualities inherent in the human experience. She is a member of NYWIFT.

photo by Johanna Pianka

Ruby Sircar: as artist, writer, curator and educator I need be a feminist killjoy. Rummaging and following through the richness of imagined and fabulated narratives which engage diasporic forms of vernacular knowledge production, as well as entangling migrational common conscious forms of thought and phrasesmithing are closest to my heart. I love pop culture and how it may help manifest diasporic self perception - how film and media allow larger-then-life images which are able to bridge exclusive gaps. Just think of Riz Ahmed and Satyajit Ray or Ms. Marvel. Performance and language, sound and migration, capital and image are the basic building blocks of my artistic and scientific work: at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna or as board member of Austria’s artist union. Most of my sonic and visual performances as well as artistic research projects are built on community and anti-authorship - I never work alone but always in active group settings, such as the feminist collective FO/GO Lab.

Julian Pixel Schmiederer (02.02.2002, AUT) is an artist and director working across film, installation, and sound art. Raised in Linz, he moved to Graz in 2016 to study filmmaking at the Ortweinschule Graz for Film and MultimediaArt.
His debut film Pressure, an underwater experimental film, was screened internationally and won multiple awards. This was followed by The 2020 RiseUp and Drama. — his 2021 graduation film — both continuing his festival success.
In 2022, the art and science collaboration I Hear Future Voices was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival. Recent sound art pieces were shown at the Localize Festival 2024, the Ars Electronica Center and the European Capital of Culture 2024. From 2024 – 2025, Julian joined the Cross-border Film School program for directing in Gorizia (IT), where he directed the short film “Lo Sfratto“.

Website: julianpixel.at
Instagram: @der_pixel

photo by Konstantin Muench

Violetta Vigh is a Budapest-based media artist working across moving image, installation, and performance. She graduated in media design from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and is currently a doctoral student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
She is particularly interested in research-based projects and topics at the intersection of science and communication history. Engaging with various media technologies, her work reflects on the competitive logic of industrial modernity, systems of control, and experiences of uncertainty. She has examined, for example, the cultural impact of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, the competition of workers and gendered narratives in socialist garment factories, and the history of modern meteorology.
Influenced by elemental philosophies and interdisciplinary thinking, her doctoral research explores how atmospheric phenomena and forecasting technologies function as both medium and metaphor, shaping our perception of uncertainty and control in everyday life as well as in the context of the ecological crisis.

Website: https://violettavigh.com/
Instagram: @violett.v_

Sana Serkebaeva is an artist and filmmaker. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2020, where she specialized in Moving Image. Her practice queries ideas of speculative narration and storytelling in relation to filmmaking, using a blend of documentary and fiction to examine how images are encoded, transmitted, misread, and remembered. She is the recipient of the Elephant Trust 2025. Her experimental films have been showcased on online platforms such as FACT and CultureHub, and her works have been exhibited at venues including the Millennium Film Workshop, ICA, and LUX. Additionally, her films have been featured at various exhibitions and festivals in the UK, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, and beyond.

Instagram: @sanaserkebaeva

Chi Jang Yin-Sender is an experimental filmmaker and media scholar whose work interrogates historical absences, archival erasures, and the limits of representation. Working across experimental cinema, VR documentary, and cinéma vérité, her practice explores how mediated images construct—and obscure—collective memory.
Her films have screened internationally at major festivals and art venues, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, European Media Arts Festival, Kasseler Dokumentarfilm- und Videofest, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.
Yin’s work moves between film and contemporary art contexts, with exhibitions spanning Europe, North America, and Asia. She holds an MFA and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a professor and Chair of Film & TV Production at The School of Cinematic Arts at DePaul University in Chicago.

Website: https://chijangyin.art/
Instagram: @chi.jang.yin

My current practice centers on painting, but I increasingly see it as a way of organizing time and experience, rather than simply a medium for emotional expression. I originally started with comics and animation storyboards, where I was used to building images through narrative. This training helped me develop an internal “camera.” I learned to move within imagined spaces, arrange viewpoints, and construct sequences of time through images. However, when I began studying painting more formally, the emphasis on emotion and formal freedom in abstract expressionism led me to believe that painting could exist independently from narrative. As my practice developed, I gradually realized that so-called “emotional brushstrokes” can also become repetitive habits. The focus on pure form sometimes left me feeling directionless. This made me reconsider whether painting could move beyond expression and become a structure with its own independent presence. In recent years, I have created anthropomorphic characters—such as “Strawberry Man,” “Dandelion Man,” and “Boat Man”—to respond to personal bodily experiences and states of migration. However, I do not see these figures as simple psychological projections. Instead, I try to transform them into visual units that can be repeatedly arranged and recontextualized—almost like a visual archive. Through this process, I began to reflect on how images carry time, record experience, and produce difference through repetition.

-Yifu Leng

Dik-Sum Man is a Berlin-based filmmaker and cultural worker born and raised in Hong Kong. With a background in film, media arts, philosophy, and sociology, she transitioned to the German cultural sector after a career in advertising and jewelry design. Her current practice spans film, museum, and community-based projects. Her films have screened internationally, and she recently founded HupHub Berlin, an initiative for grassroots community engagement and transcultural dialogue. Her curatorial interests include the politics of listening and the tactile qualities of handwork, practices that bring attention back to the body and create space for slower, more attentive forms of experience. In her artistic practice, she is currently exploring video essays and the intersections between digital media art and textile-based practices.
In her ongoing explorations of cinema, she is interested in forms of cinematic realism, particularly how unscripted moments, physical causality, and duration shape a sense of presence on screen. She is developing a line of inquiry around what she describes as the “realist paradox”: the tension between constructed images and lived experience. In this context, she reflects on how organic experiences are perceived, and whether emerging technologies such as AI can produce a comparable affect as they continue to evolve.

Instagram of HupHub Berlin: @hup.hub.berlin

Júlia Polo Alabart is an independent curator, researcher and cultural practitioner based in South London and Barcelona. She works closely with artists across moving image, sound, expanded cinema, and performance, guiding her practice toward exploring how these languages can be mediated through process-oriented formats that foreground experimentation and embodied awareness.
Her current research explores embodiment as a critical vessel through which to distill questions of identity, place, and memory, and their resonances in both individual and collective bodies. She is interested in the entanglements between corporeality and consciousness in processes of sociality and meaning-making.
Her curatorial practice is grounded in collaborative and relational methodologies, and is interested in the political implications of deep listening, slow curating, and site-sensitive engagements. She is the co-founder of soft shock, alongside Georgie Worth, a curatorial collective devising socially-engaged public programmes that centre intergenerational dialogues, slow-doing, and reciprocity with more-than-human entities.
She holds a BA in Communication and Cultural Industries (Universitat de Barcelona), and an MFA in Curating (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her recent curatorial work has involved collaborations with Artangel, Loop Barcelona, Gasworks, Apiary Studios, Lewisham Arthouse, SET Social and Tolson Museum.

Website: https://juliapolo.cargo.site
Instagram: @juliapolo_

hua xi zi “cecilia” is an artist and researcher working across image production, performance, and network infrastructure. xi zi cares for perspectives between systems of tactics, technologies, knowledge, and aesthetics—shaped by different geopolitical and socio-technological structures observed from her lived experiences between the U.S. and China. She examines how agency and control are distributed between individuals and coordinated publics. She currently works at NYU Shanghai Interactive Media Arts and has previously taught a media and internet art course at East China Normal University. xi zi received her MFA in Film, Video, New Media and Animation from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA in Cinema and Media Studies from University of Southern California; she is also an alumna of the School for Poetic Computation.
Website: https://ceciliahua.com/

Georg Simbeni is a Berlin-based media curator, audience designer, and cinematographer with a deep focus on translating film history into spatial and digital experiences. Since 2012, he has worked with the Deutsche Kinemathek, curating exhibitions such as The German Cinema, Werner Herzog, and Frame by Frame – Restoring Film. His work operates at the intersection of media curation, camera-based documentary practice, and film historiography, moving the cinematic image beyond the classic screen and into the museum space. As a Director of Photography, his film work has been screened and awarded at festivals worldwide. He is a member of the European Film Academy and holds degrees in Cinematography from filmArche Berlin and Comparative Literature from the University of Innsbruck.

Website: georgsimbeni.onfabrik.com

Vedant Srinivas is an independent curator, researcher, writer, and film programmer from New Delhi, with a special interest in creative non-fiction and experimental moving-image works. His practice traverses writing, curatorial projects, and festival programming, tracing the intersections between moving-image and vernacular culture in South Asia. He has a background in philosophy, anthropology, cinema, and art history, and is a student of South Indian classical music.
His writing has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Posthuman Studies, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Visual Anthropology Review, Senses of Cinema, MUBI Notebook, Critical Inquiry, Cineaste, and FIPRESCI-India, among others. He has participated in several workshops and residencies, including Berlinale Talents, Emerging Curators Lab, Arthshila Visual Arts Writing Residency, the moving-image curation workshop ARCUREA, and the Young Critics Workshop Gent.
His current curatorial research explores the ontology of the moving image through the lens of Indian aesthetics and philosophy — thinking through ideas of matter, sensation, and presence that cut across cinema, performance, and visual art.

I am an artist from Northeast China, based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and HFBK Hamburg. My practice focuses on personal and historical narratives, specifically exploring the connections between Northeast Asia’s layered histories—migration, social change—and family memories. Using a small camera, I document my surroundings and interview family members, while developing collective approaches through collaboration. This ongoing project is a documentary exploring these interwoven stories
-Wenfei Zhao

Zach McLane is a writer and artist currently based in Galveston, Texas. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on race, militarism, and issues of environmental justice as they intersect with image making practices. His recent work is concerned with the aestheticization of land, the enmeshment of militarism in everyday life, and the means by which artists, activists, and working people have conceptualized and resisted the war machine.

Website: zachmclane.com

Rachel Ashton is a British artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main.
Her short experimental films move between documentary and fiction through improvisation and observation, allowing narratives to emerge through a playful, personal, essayistic approach. Her works are often presented site-specifically, engaging with cultural memory through reenactment and text, treating the archive as a living practice.
Ashton appears alongside participants in her films, considering how the camera shapes both performer and spectator. Her practice reflects on the tension between control and unpredictability in filmmaking, as well as how human experience is witnessed and represented.
She has shown works at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, the Julia Stoschek Collection, and Kunstverein Braunschweig, and has been awarded funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg for experimental film.

Website: Rachelashton.org
Instagram: @rachelelizabethashton

Elaine Wong is an artist, producer and educator. Her practice centers on videography; it is her primary way of thinking and feeling in the world. She is interested in exploring the potentials of moving images and its materiality, focusing on the inner conditions of human experience and the subtle complexity of everyday life.
Based in Hong Kong, she received her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Creative Media of the City University of Hong Kong (2019) and Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) in painting from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (2014). Her works shift between video art, documentary and digital content programming, often blurring these boundaries rather than treating them as separate genres. She seeks to translate her beliefs into platforms that connect artistic expression, social and cultural contexts with conceptual inquiry through production and programming.
Her recent projects with cultural institutions include M+ Museum, Hong Kong Palace Museum and Hong Kong Museum of Art. Apart from her video projects, she also teaches at tertiary institutions and universities in Hong Kong. Elaine is also the founder of art platform Altermodernists to promote visual arts in Hong Kong.

Website: https://miss-wong.com

Yuchi Ma (马语迟) is a Beijing-born artist, filmmaker, and Parachute Kid currently based in LA. Yuchi earned her BFA in Film and TV Production from USC in 2019, then pursued an MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA in 2022. Yuchi has screened and exhibited in various film and art spaces across the US and around the world. In 2023, her film RED THREADS won the Grand Jury Prize for Experimental Shorts at the Slamdance Film Festival. In 2025, Yuchi had her first solo show, Pandas are Pandas, at LA Artcore, with support from Foundations for Contemporary Arts. The same work had its UK premiere at the 2025 Aesthetica Film Festival and is slated for release with Bridge Video Chicago in May 2026. Alongside her video practice, Yuchi curates screenings focused on intercultural cinema, having previously worked with Occidental College, LA’s Rich and Successful Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, and more.
Yuchi is interested in meaning-making in intercultural experiences and believes in experimental film/video-making as a language of resistance against the commercial lexicon and consumption. Yuchi's works explore themes of home and kinship, the simulation of nostalgia, borders, and national identities through archive and pop culture. Yuchi makes videos to close the gap between herself and the world surrounding her, which is also an attempt to return home.

Website: https://yuchiapple.cargo.site/
Instagram: @streetcornyuchi

Karen Hui is a London-based curator whose practice interrogates the intersections of transhumanism and future ecologies. Her work facilitates rigorous dialogues between artists, scholars, and scientists, aiming to bridge academic frameworks with public discourse through collaborative knowledge exchange.

With a multidisciplinary background spanning sociology and festival coordination, Karen’s curatorial methodology encompasses research, programme design and communication. Her practice explores the dynamics between contemporary art, community engagement and cultural identity. She maintains a particular interest in documentary and experimental moving images and contributes as a member of the reviewing committee for the KONTEKST Film Festival. Currently, Karen is pursuing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her present research focuses on the conceptual rewriting of bodily definitions, investigating how the human form is perceived and reconfigured within evolving technological and environmental contexts.

Taylor Edelle Stuart is a film director, video artist, and theatre maker. She recently completed You Really Like Me!, her debut short as a writer-director, and directed the web series Boy Shorts, created by actress and producer Molly Brown.
As a video artist and projection designer, her work focuses on the interplay between digital media and physical bodies and spaces by cultivating harmony and tension between theatrical and cinematic modes. This work has been presented at MoMA PS1, the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Ars Nova, La MaMa, and La Jolla Playhouse, among many others. Most notably, she co-designed the world premiere of the musical The Outsiders alongside Tal Yarden.
As an associate video and projection designer her work has been seen with American Ballet Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, and on Broadway stages in productions such as Floyd Collins (designed by Ruey Horng Sun) and Water for Elephants (designed by David Bengali), both of which were nominated for the Tony.
Most recently, she was associate video designer on Oedipus on Broadway starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville adapted and directed by Robert Icke, which recently transferred to the Residenztheater in Munich. For the Munich production, she directed the opening film.

Website: www.tayloredellestuart.com
Instagram: @tayloredelle

Kasia Smuga is a media artist, film programmer, and festival producer based in the Niagara region, Canada. With a background in visual arts and training in video editing, her artistic practice works with archival material from analog and digital film formats, presented through site-responsive installations and live projection. Using layered collage, looping structures, and adapted animation techniques, the imagery engages the affective potential of interactive media.
Her programming, production, and curatorial practice has developed through workshops, exhibitions, and film programs in artist-run centres, independent galleries and cinemas, and community-based initiatives across the region. She has managed large-scale technical installations and performance-based projects for Nuit Blanche Toronto, and led the development of programming operations for a new art house cinema at The Film House in St. Catharines.
A longtime member and collaborator with the Niagara Artists Centre, she co-founded the Mighty Niagara Film Fest in 2021, an artist-led festival rooted in hands-on experimental practice, regional collaboration, and a commitment to nurturing a distinct film culture in Niagara.
As Lead Programmer of the Mighty Niagara Film Fest, she develops platforms for experimental media and expanded cinema, supporting local film production while connecting regional work with national and international practices through an interdisciplinary program spanning screenings, installations, and live audiovisual events.

Gemma Riggs is an artist, filmmaker and educator who works across film, sound, installation and performance. She is interested in how we translate emotion and affect through language, vocal utterance, body and gesture, to show how our inner worlds manifest in physical and auditory ways. Her work often employs structures of duration, pace, rhythm and repetition to reveal overlooked or intangible detail.
Gemma has received numerous awards to make public-facing artwork from Arts Council England as well as research and travel awards from the British Council and Creative Europe. Through her work You Move Me, a 6-channel video installation, she brought two communities in the UK and Lithuania to participate and perform together within the work as moving portraits. Multiple screens become devices to embrace synecdoche that reveal differences and similarities and allow the viewer to experience the microcosm.
Gemma has worked and exhibited widely in Europe and has participated in international residencies including Emotional Bodies and Cities and Magic Carpets. Her continued collaboration with dancers and choreographers has allowed her to place the body at the centre of her work, embracing notions of emotionality and embodiment.
With a dedication to working and co-creating with communities, Gemma is interested in finding routes to authentic participation. She often starts with dialogue and conversation as a core exploratory process, and through that, embeds a connection with people and society within her work. Her commitment to developing ways of working that actively welcome all audiences has been persistent, and since becoming a mother aligns to how we involve parents, families and children more actively in culture.
Gemma taught documentary practice on MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art from 2015 – 2022 and she continues to develop pedagogic practice at the University of the Arts London. She is London born, and currently lives and works from the coastal town of Folkestone, looking out towards France.