Over the course of the nine years that the Collaborative Studio has been up and running, we’ve hosted over 80 artists for the annual 10 month residency program and produced a varied body of work that has screened at acclaimed venues and festivals internationally. Come celebrate some selections from the collection for a good cause — fundraising to support the productions of this year’s 12 fellows!

We’re settling into Spring and opening the backyard screening setup for this showcase so don’t miss a chance to see these films under the stars. 8PM films start and party starts at 10. Filmmakers will be in attendance for discussion following the program.

To teach her children how to avoid becoming another police brutality victim, activist and choreographer Adia Whitaker leads her ensemble in the creation of a new stirring performance. The film is a collaboration between Adia, her ensemble and the filmmakers.

Couchsurferz (2011) is a journey into the homes of friends and strangers in search of ‘significance’ in the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sleeping on assorted couches, the surferz document the people and physical environments of their overnight stays. Over the course of a year, the surferz explore the relationships that develop between themselves, their hosts and the spaces they inhabit. Along for the journey are issues of representation, subjectivity, and agency in documentary filmmaking.

Division Avenue is an experimental short film about one of the most prominent yet often ignored landmarks of New York, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Examining the architecture and fabric of the highway through poetic imagery and experimental ambient sound recordings, the film reveals traces of lives lived in the shadow of the massive concrete sculpture. Built through densely inhabited neighborhoods, the modernist highway of the controversial city planner Robert Moses reshaped and disrupted the city forever, creating vast non-spaces within once thriving communities. Division Avenue invites the audience to encounter urban landscape in a unique and curious way.

A look at the plight of 3 experimental art spaces in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a soaring rental market continues to push artist communities further out.

Sarah is a researcher and media maker based in New York City. Motivated by her experiences working in the mental health field, Sarah arrived at documentary arts as a means of grappling with social and psychological complexities, building empathy, and engaging and empowering communities. She has worked on a number of fiction and non-fiction films, including her role as Associate Producer on the Emmy Award-winning documentary, We Could Be King. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she received her B.A. in Psychology from Boston University before spending several years teaching in rural Spain.

Beata’s passion for social issues and the stories behind them has led her down many different paths. She has studied and worked on projects in Poland, England, and Cyprus. Beata’s been awarded the European Union grant to set up her own non-profit to produce media and research projects and was also awarded first prize at the Goethe Institute international competition for her documentary short debut.

She’s completed an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lodz, in addition to the Film and TV Production program at the Lodz Film School, the Scholarship in Visual Anthropology at the University of Cyprus and the Documentary Film Program at UCLA. She’s also been part of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working with the diplomatic mission in Los Angeles. Beata is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

Joshua Gen Solondz is a media artist/filmmaker/musician. His work has shown in programs at DCTV, Light Industry, Artists’ Television Access, .HBC Berlin, Harvard Film Archive, UnionDocs, and Parsons Hall Project Space. Josh’s work was also featured in the 2011 Images Festival in Toronto as well as the 2010 Documentary Fortnight at MOMA.

Partnering with Emma Brenner Malin, Josh programmed and introduced the child exploitation film “Child Bride of the Ozarks” at Light Industry in February 2010. Josh recently completed an artists’ residency with his friend and collaborator Jim Supanick at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY for their ongoing “Synthhumpers” project. Josh graduated from Bard College in 2008, lives in Brooklyn, and loves cats.

Emma Brenner-Malin is a writer, sex-ed programmer, and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. She has conducted research for the Boston Healing Landscape Project,curated & interned at Light Industry, a new venue for experimental film and video, and solicited funds for Marie Regan’s documentary feature Cowboy Song. Emma graduated from Bard College in 2008 with a BA in Anthropology. She is currently progam coordinator at Love Heals, the Alison Gertz Foundation for AIDS Education.

Anne-Katrine Hansen is a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. She works with documentaries that explore how people make meaning. She has worked as photographer and editor for the Danish Film Institute and independent production companies. She then moved on to manage the ethnographic film project Sensory Relations at Aarhus University. On the side she trains social change volunteers in ActionAid Denmark. If you cannot find her in Copenhagen, she is probably in India.

Katherin is a self-taught filmmaker, videographer and photographer based in Brooklyn, whose work seeks to blur the borders of narrative and experimental documentary. She enjoys collaborating with music composers and considers sound a great inspiration for her creations. In May 2014, Katherin released her first feature documentary CLIM8 at the Altitudes Festival in Switzerland, which is being distributed by Les Disques du 7ème Ciel on DVD and vinyl in summer 2015. In 2015, Katherin co-directed two shorts, The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog and I Was Here First, for the Living Los Sures interactive documentary project. She is coordinator of the New York Docs Film Fatales collective and will start directing her first fiction feature in summer 2015 with two Fatales members.