We’re overjoyed to welcome Tara Mateik and his galvanizing, unstoppable energy back to UnionDocs to lead this workshop investigating embodied resistance through collaborative media-making and how small, tactical gestures build toward collective celebration and resistance.

This 3-day participatory workshop focuses on community-based documentary work that highlights communities facing systemic erasure from public life.

Participants will engage in hands-on collaborative exercises that demonstrate historical precedents for coalition-building while addressing current political urgencies. We’ll be taking a magnifying lens to questions such as:

What media has historically provided space for autonomy and self-representation? How do we reclaim media-making when spaces are scaled for bodies with more capital and value — challenging who gets access to housing, architecture, gendered spaces?

How do our bodies change the meaning of historical images when we inhabit them together?

What are the strategies we can employ to overcome the normative pitfalls of collective collaboration?

What happens when we touch and handle the actual materials of resistance movements?

And how can we adapt spaces and objects to work with our bodies, rather than against them?

Drawing from the facilitators’ diverse practices and experiences in sustaining long-term community-based practices that bring bodies together in space, this workshop is an opportunity for connection-building and strategy-sharing across communities who face overlapping forms of discrimination, medical gatekeeping, and legislative targeting. These intersections are particularly visible in how these communities must constantly adapt physically to a world designed without them in mind.

Each session is therefore designed around touch, collaboration, and being with other bodies—it’s practical, it’s tactical.

Tara Mateik will kick off proceedings in inimitable style, engaging directly with participants in a live collaborative reenactment of a photograph taken by T.L. Litt at an ACT-UP Housing Committee protest at Trump Tower in 1989, allowing participants to inhabit the physical positions and emotional registers of bodies in protest. Tara will then be joined by filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman, adapting learnings taken from her latest feature The Tallest Dwarf (SXSW 2025), inviting participants to adapt to and reconsider our relationship with the built environment. DeeDee Halleck, media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television will reflect on her extensive experience in community media-making. Finally, Emmy-award winning director Ted Passon will share with participants the practical ethics and politics he engages in his documentary practice working alongside people living with disability.

We’ll also invite participants to share a work-in-progress from their own practice and engage in group discussion around each other’s projects regarding embodied resistance, collective action and community media.

Join us for an energized three days of exploration! Seats are limited. Sign up today.

10:00a

Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.

10:30a

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

11:45a

Discussion

12:30p

Share / Discussion / Exercise

1:00p

Lunch (on your own)

2:00p

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

3:15p

Discussion

4:00p

Workshop Exercise + Critique

5:00p

Wrap Up

Tara Mateik is a multimedia performance artist and videomaker whose work critically reenacts historical moments of collective transformation. These reenactments are not passive recreations of the past, but political interventions into our understanding of history, working with queer iconography to explore the ways in which history is written on, and by, actual bodies. Performing with other gender nonconforming bodies, his work disrupts participants’ expectations and generates new political potentialities—in essence, to pervert the audiovisual archive.

His current projects include Double Take, a series of video tableaux restaging archival photographs from significant moments in queer and trans history. Double Take: ACT-UP / Trump Tower, NY / October 31, 1989, for example, brought together an intergenerational group of artists, activists, and housing advocates to reenact a photograph of a protest at Trump Tower by the ACT UP Housing Committee (including the photographer and participants in the original event). Hard Pill to Swallow: A Valley of the Dolls Case Study is a multimedia performance and video project exploring the legacy of the 1967 film based on Jacqueline Susann’s novel. Through reenactments, video screen tests, and animation, Hard Pill provides an intervention into Hollywood’s longstanding exploitation of young stars.

Mateik’s work has been exhibited at venues including SFMOMA, MoMA PS1, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, and Participant Inc., and he has been awarded support from Creative Capital (2008), Franklin Furnace (2013-2014), and the MacDowell Colony (2018). His videos are distributed by Video Data Bank.

Ted Passon is an Emmy, Peabody, Gotham, Sundance, duPont-Columbia, Humanitas, and Cinema Eye award-winning director whose films and series have played at the Sundance Festival, The Berlin Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, The Venice Biennale, Hot Docs, and many others. His feature film “Patrice: The Movie” (Hulu), was named “One of the best documentaries of the year” by Vogue and became one of the “Most Liked Documentaries” on Hulu. His series “Philly D.A.” (PBS) an 8-part series co-directed with Yoni Brook, was hailed as “one of the best TV shows of the year” by TIME, The New York Times, Variety, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter , The Washington Post, Vulture, Vogue, Slate, Indiewire, and The New Yorker. Ted was also a director on the Netflix series “Worn Stories”, which holds a 100% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and became the 5th most watched show on Netflix in the US. Ted is a co-founder of All Ages Productions and a board member of the Blackstar Film Festival.

Julie Forrest Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship – all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism.  THE TALLEST DWARF (SXSW 2025, Independent Lens 2026) her new feature documentary opens from a personal embodied inquiry into a reflection on disabled identity and culture and a collaboration with little people performing artists. Her 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy award winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and a resident of SF Film Society’s Filmhouse, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction and Points North. Her films, including FatMob (2016) Buoyant (2005) and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. She serves as Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.

DeeDee Halleck is a media activist, founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. DeeDee is an innovator in documentary, video art, and public access television. In collaboration with renowned American artists, Halleck has produced a unique body of work that reflects on art, academics, politics, performance, and live television. She has a long career advocating for media reform for public television, public interest, public set-asides, and national public telecommunications policy. DeeDee is the author of Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media (2002). She has received five lifetime achievement awards from organizations such as the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the Alliance for Community Media; the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, the Schmio Awards, and the Union for Democratic Communication.