Biography
I am a Swedish filmmaker, visual artist, curator, and media scholar based in Chicago. My work focuses on queer cinema and art, experimental film and video, media archaeology, and archival practice. I am currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and hold an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
My creative practice is centered on queer storytelling through an autobiographical and archival lens, and I make films and videos about queer history, representation, identity, and sexuality engaged in formal, narrative, and aesthetic experimentation. My work counters mainstream and stereotypical images of gay men and youth by using appropriated text, photos, sound, and video to make visible the hidden, sometimes unflattering, and often unarchivable traces of queer experience. My work is also informed by a queer media-archaeological methodology, which manifests in my use of obsolete and found media, as well as a self-reflexive aesthetic that foregrounds the materiality of the moving image and its processes of mediation. My award-winning films are distributed by Vtape and Light Cone and have screened at festivals, galleries, and museums internationally, including Antimatter Media Art Festival, Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, London Experimental Film Festival, and Beijing International Short Film Festival.
My dissertation project, tentatively titled “Private Visions,” examines gay men’s home movies and amateur films between 1930 and 1970, an almost wholly overlooked chapter of the history of queer cinema. As my dissertation argues, for gay men, amateur filmmaking was not merely a means of creative expression or historical documentation, but also served to bring gay men together in their own collective self-fashioning. The first part of this project, an essay on François Reichenbach’s amateur filmmaking activities throughout the early 1950s, won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Queer and Trans Caucus Chris Holmlund Prize and recently appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies. In relation to this larger project, with Louisa Trott and Patricia Ledesma Villon, I am also co-editing two special issues of The Moving Image on small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film, exploring the development of scholarship and preservation efforts within these subfields over the past three decades.
I am currently working on two other research projects. The first focuses on how filmmakers and artists appropriate technologies of remote vision typically used as tools of state violence and control, including drones and surveillance cameras, by observing, documenting, and “witnessing” human rights abuses while challenging deeply flawed regimes of militarized vision and evidence. The second focuses on the afterlives of early cinema in contemporary film and media culture, including the reuse of silent films in fine arts, avant-garde, and other found footage film practices and the remediation of early film heritage through digital technologies. Essays related to both of these projects, as well as to my broader interests in media preservation, have appeared in The Archivability of Television, Found Footage Magazine, Cinéma & Cie, and Media, War & Conflict. My research has been generously supported by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Carolina Public Humanities, the UNC Center for European Studies, the UChicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, among others.
As an archivist, I have worked on preservation, digitization, and cataloging projects with Media Burn Independent Video Archive and the South Side Home Movie Project, and served as project manager for the Educational Communications and Television Services Archive at UW–Milwaukee, preserving and digitizing over 250 tapes from the campus television studio’s fifty-year history. At UWM, I also co-founded the Patricia Mellencamp Film and Television Archive, a student-led teaching archive, with Christian Balistreri and Tami Williams. As part of our research on media-archival pedagogy, Balistreri and I co-edited a special issue of Synoptique offering new perspectives on the state of graduate and undergraduate audiovisual preservation education today. As a curator, I have also programmed for several festivals and curated multiple film programs, installations, and performances, including for the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the UWM Union Cinema, the UChicago Film Studies Center, and the Cochrane Woods Art Center.
Since 2021, I serve as Founding Editor of Artifact & Apparatus: Journal of Media Archaeology, an independent, peer-reviewed member journal of the Radical Open Access Collective. I have also served as co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee since 2020 and as board member and co-secretary of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema since 2023. At the University of Chicago, I have also coordinated the Mass Culture, Digital Media, and Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshops.