Identity, Resilience, Revolution
Dead Name — Gina Kamentsky
My dead name is trying to kill me.
Gina Kamentsky is an experimental animator and sound artist based in Providence Rhode Island. Her anxious and joyful short films blast out at twenty-four frames per second searing eyeballs and sending waves of buzz and crackle into the ether.
Over her three decade career she’s progressed through numerous forms including painting, drawing and collaging on film, Rotoscope, Musique concrète, sound collage, stop motion and Pixilation.
Kamentsky’s films have screened at festivals nationally and worldwide including Ottawa International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Animator Festival in Poznań Poland.
Gina Kamentsky is an experimental animator and sound artist based in Providence Rhode Island. Her anxious and joyful short films blast out at twenty-four frames per second searing eyeballs and sending waves of buzz and crackle into the ether.
Over her three decade career she’s progressed through numerous forms including painting, drawing and collaging on film, Rotoscope, Musique concrète, sound collage, stop motion and Pixilation.
Kamentsky’s films have screened at festivals nationally and worldwide including Ottawa International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Animator Festival in Poznań Poland.
Vestal Virgin Vengeance — Virginia L. Montgomery
Vestal Virgin Vengeance is a surreal, sculptural, non‑narrative and live‑action—that invokes the gaze and the mythic power of the Vestal Virgins to confront the crisis in Texas women’s healthcare, made in response to the 2024 deaths of Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain under Texas’s abortion ban. Shot en plein air on a miniature prop set and driven by a hands‑on material inquiry (the artist’s Dewalt® drill as femme aggression, honey as healing) with a synesthetic soundscape of Texas bird song, weather, and drills, the film fuses feminism, metaphysics, and image theory into a ritual of destruction, care, and sisterhood.
Virginia L. Montgomery (b. Houston, TX) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin.
VLM is known for her surreal, synthesia-esque artworks which unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own neurodivergent world. Virginia L. Montgomery has had solo presentations with New Museum (NY), Midnight Moment at Times Square Arts (NY), Tate Film at Tate Modern (United Kingdom), and among others.
Virginia L. Montgomery (b. Houston, TX) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin.
VLM is known for her surreal, synthesia-esque artworks which unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own neurodivergent world. Virginia L. Montgomery has had solo presentations with New Museum (NY), Midnight Moment at Times Square Arts (NY), Tate Film at Tate Modern (United Kingdom), and among others.
trannies live forever: turn your eyes to the sky - Thair Thursday
A transfag hero of the old midWest is laid low by The Men. What will become of him?
Turn your eyes to the sky! Turn your eyes to the sky! A transfag hero goes to battle with The Men. Laid low, he chooses the path best known to him: transformation.’
Thair Thursday is an interdisciplinary maker living, teaching, growing, and making in Illinois. The proud son of a transfag lineage, Thair likes to explore the technologies of social agreements and how they impact our relationships, behaviors, and movements.
Turn your eyes to the sky! Turn your eyes to the sky! A transfag hero goes to battle with The Men. Laid low, he chooses the path best known to him: transformation.’
Thair Thursday is an interdisciplinary maker living, teaching, growing, and making in Illinois. The proud son of a transfag lineage, Thair likes to explore the technologies of social agreements and how they impact our relationships, behaviors, and movements.
Haiku — Christine Banna
Haiku is a 2D animated music video, for singer/songwriter Moira Smiley, created in response to the ongoing realities of genocide worldwide. Inspired by a haiku by Kobayashi Issa, the film follows a young woman split between two simultaneous states of being, reflecting the fracture between the beauties of everyday life and the persistent presence of human-made global violence and suffering.
Christine Banna is an Assistant Professor of Film and Animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Banna works in both technological and traditional processes with a focus on experimental animation and projection design for live performance.
She has most recently collaborated with Colorado State University’s Symphony Orchestra, Mount Hope World Singers chorus, and singer/songwriter Moira Smiley. Her recent film, Pink Pottery (2022), has screened globally and won several awards including, most recently, from the European Cultural Council (ECC) in Venice, Italy. It also screened at the Archaeology Channel conference and streaming through their broadcast series, Strata: Portraits of Humanity.
Christine Banna is an Assistant Professor of Film and Animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Banna works in both technological and traditional processes with a focus on experimental animation and projection design for live performance.
She has most recently collaborated with Colorado State University’s Symphony Orchestra, Mount Hope World Singers chorus, and singer/songwriter Moira Smiley. Her recent film, Pink Pottery (2022), has screened globally and won several awards including, most recently, from the European Cultural Council (ECC) in Venice, Italy. It also screened at the Archaeology Channel conference and streaming through their broadcast series, Strata: Portraits of Humanity.
Dominion — McLean Fahnestock
Repeated bombing runs produce a unique type of destruction upon a landscape. Gold leafed munitions, promises of wealth and prosperity, burst upon the hills and coat them in developments; suburban housing tracts, parking lots, and strip malls erupt in the wake of golden plumes of smoke. After they have run out of land the lay waste to, the bombers begin to attack each other, the violence of convenience and expansion turning upon itself.
McLean Fahnestock is a Nashville based interdisciplinary artist who works who works with desire in the manufactured landscape and its violent consequences. The grandchild of an explorer, McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place, real and unreal, and question how we process the landscape into information to obtain knowledge. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the Aurora Picture Show and Menil Collection, Houston, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, North Carolina, Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria, The California Science Museum, Los Angeles, The British Library, London, and MOCA Hiroshima, Japan. Her work was selected for Off the Screen at the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival.
McLean Fahnestock is a Nashville based interdisciplinary artist who works who works with desire in the manufactured landscape and its violent consequences. The grandchild of an explorer, McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place, real and unreal, and question how we process the landscape into information to obtain knowledge. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the Aurora Picture Show and Menil Collection, Houston, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, North Carolina, Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria, The California Science Museum, Los Angeles, The British Library, London, and MOCA Hiroshima, Japan. Her work was selected for Off the Screen at the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival.
LUMINOUS MATTER : Bianca Arnold & Moss Berke
A collaborative work between artists, writers, and lovers Bianca Arnold and Moss Berke, Luminous Matter invites viewers to experience the transformative power of the everyday, where love, dress up, and play are valued as methods of queer co-becoming.
Bianca Arnold (Turin, 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher with degrees in anthropology and gender studies. Her work ranges from installations to video art, writing, and painting. A solo exhibition of her work (I Bambini del Compost) opened in 2022 in Bologna. She has also published several articles on queerness and cinema. Bianca has directed several short films, including di vento e di voci (of wind and voices) (2024), co-directed with Giuliana Zungri, and Vogliamo Una Vita Bella (We Want A Beautiful Life) (2025). She is currently attending the documentary filmmaking course at CSC, the Italian national film school. She collaborates with Sicilia Queer Film Fest and is part of Sbaraglio Cinema, independent film collective in Palermo.
Moss Berke (New York, 1995) is a writer, researcher, and multidisciplinary artist who is situated in the expansive intersection of gender studies and environmental humanities. Her research and arts practice bring together fiber arts, poetry, video, landart, tattooing, collective activism, and performance. Her work creates experiments with themes of loss, grief, and desire, more-than-human intimacies, and non-normative temporalities. Most recently, Moss co-curated an exhibition, Limbo, which mobilized de-colonial and queer theory to approach the entangled world of wetlands. Moss' articles and poems can be found in Almanac Journal of Trans* Poetics, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies, LagoonScapes Journal of Environmental Humanities, Soapbox Journal of Cultural Analysis, and elsewhere.
Bianca and Moss have been a creative duo since 2023, and in 2025 they inaugurated their installation/performance “Proximity Rehearsal” at Galleria Rollò in Palermo, which was then presented in October 2025 at the Lesbian Lives Conference in New York City. They live and work in Palermo, Italy.
Bianca Arnold (Turin, 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher with degrees in anthropology and gender studies. Her work ranges from installations to video art, writing, and painting. A solo exhibition of her work (I Bambini del Compost) opened in 2022 in Bologna. She has also published several articles on queerness and cinema. Bianca has directed several short films, including di vento e di voci (of wind and voices) (2024), co-directed with Giuliana Zungri, and Vogliamo Una Vita Bella (We Want A Beautiful Life) (2025). She is currently attending the documentary filmmaking course at CSC, the Italian national film school. She collaborates with Sicilia Queer Film Fest and is part of Sbaraglio Cinema, independent film collective in Palermo.
Moss Berke (New York, 1995) is a writer, researcher, and multidisciplinary artist who is situated in the expansive intersection of gender studies and environmental humanities. Her research and arts practice bring together fiber arts, poetry, video, landart, tattooing, collective activism, and performance. Her work creates experiments with themes of loss, grief, and desire, more-than-human intimacies, and non-normative temporalities. Most recently, Moss co-curated an exhibition, Limbo, which mobilized de-colonial and queer theory to approach the entangled world of wetlands. Moss' articles and poems can be found in Almanac Journal of Trans* Poetics, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies, LagoonScapes Journal of Environmental Humanities, Soapbox Journal of Cultural Analysis, and elsewhere.
Bianca and Moss have been a creative duo since 2023, and in 2025 they inaugurated their installation/performance “Proximity Rehearsal” at Galleria Rollò in Palermo, which was then presented in October 2025 at the Lesbian Lives Conference in New York City. They live and work in Palermo, Italy.
Perverse Feminine : Kalen Aradia
In Perverse Feminine, four women challenge the cultural meaning of “perversion,” confronting shame, repression, and desire as they reclaim the parts of themselves once cast as deviant and discover new forms of identity and power.
Kalen Aradia, PhD, is a filmmaker, author, and feminist scholar whose work examines the psychological and mythic dimensions of femininity. Her creative practice emerged from an inquiry into how women learn to relinquish power, shaped in part by her own experiences with domestic violence, psychiatric misdiagnosis, and the cultural pathologization of emotion. Seeking to understand why certain traits are labeled irrational or dangerous, her research led to the concept and transformative framework of the Perverse Feminine Archetype. As a published author, she blends scholarship with experimental nonfiction, striving to highlight collective stories of madness, sexuality, and spiritual rupture. Her work approaches the personal as mythic terrain, where individual experience becomes a lens for examining cultural power, resistance, and transformation.
Kalen Aradia, PhD, is a filmmaker, author, and feminist scholar whose work examines the psychological and mythic dimensions of femininity. Her creative practice emerged from an inquiry into how women learn to relinquish power, shaped in part by her own experiences with domestic violence, psychiatric misdiagnosis, and the cultural pathologization of emotion. Seeking to understand why certain traits are labeled irrational or dangerous, her research led to the concept and transformative framework of the Perverse Feminine Archetype. As a published author, she blends scholarship with experimental nonfiction, striving to highlight collective stories of madness, sexuality, and spiritual rupture. Her work approaches the personal as mythic terrain, where individual experience becomes a lens for examining cultural power, resistance, and transformation.
