Anna Barsan is an artist, filmmaker, and educator working in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her films and multimedia work consider how bodies are subject to and conduits of power as well as vessels for transformation. Barsan’s work explores migration and surveillance, history and memory, athletics and gender identity, often seeking out gaps, erasures, and omissions from public records and historical accounts.
Barsan’s work is both collaborative and interdisciplinary, rooted in relationships and the cross pollination of creative spheres from painting and collage to physics and ecology. Working alongside community organizers, historians, and artists, she prioritizes participatory practices like constructing shared archives and co-creating public video projections and installations, multiplying channels of access to materials and research gathered during the production process. Beyond the body as a subject of her filmmaking, Anna conceives of the filmmaking process as a somatic and sensory experience - alive with physical movement, intuition, and colliding bodies and stories.
Anna’s work has been featured at Sundance, HotDocs, Camden International Film Festival, Rooftop Films Summer Series, The Brooklyn Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum and published by Field of Vision, The New Yorker, Art21 and Democracy Now. As an educator, Anna has taught courses at the School for Visual Arts, SUNY Empire State, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba, and coordinated workshops in filmmaking and live video performance at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. Anna is currently at work on both short and long-form projects including her first feature film, Softly in all directions, with support from Field of Vision, the LEF Foundation, and the Sundance Institute.
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