Doors 7:00p
Show 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs is thrilled to invite you to a night celebrating the incredible artists supported by our Fiscal Sponsorship program! Come through and tune into a special showcase of work with the following artists in attendance: Isaac Green Diebboll, Maggie Brennan, Brit Fryer and Noah Schamus, Marley McDonald, sTo Len, Chloe Prasinos, Caroline Pahl, Bohdana Smyrnova, and Fatimah Asghar. And joining remotely to present their work are Mary Helena Clark, Lu Olkowski, Daniel Fishkin, Derek Howard, Emily Drummer, Zoe Beloff, and Mauricio Arango.

Their work traverses extraordinary terrain — resurrecting the electric atmosphere of an early 1900s Yiddish theater, blurring memory and magic in a meditation on life and death, and animating the strange intersections of relics, crime, and womanhood. These projects span a trans community shaping their stories into performance, an archival excavation of the American Museum of Natural History, and a sonic inquiry into a mysterious instrument. They move through New York’s psychic shops, the city’s long-buried sanitation media archives, and the inner worlds of dissolving relationships. They revisit the 2003 blackout, chronicle a Ukrainian family’s return to a war-torn home, and map a journey toward ancestral reconnection in Pakistan.

This is a free community event. Come through and toast these pioneering artists and their budding projects!

All of the presenting artists in this program received a 2025 Support for Artists grant, administered through UnionDocs’ fiscal sponsorship program and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature

Program

Life Forgotten by Zoe Beloff

Set in New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, Life Forgotten centers on a real storefront cinema, Frank Seiden’s Variety Theater. Here silent movies were anything but. Frank and his sons improvised dialog for the films and sang Yiddish ballads to an audience that didn’t hesitate to join in or argue back. It was a welcoming space for women and the film follows a group of radical young garment workers who gather here to figure out how to fight for women’s rights and change their world.

Longing For The Call of the Spirits Ringing in My Ear by Isaac Green Diebboll

This is a magical realism feature-length non-fiction film that draws from a cameraman’s memories of childhood and parenthood to explore the boundaries of life, death and the imagination.

Venerations by Maggie Brennan

Venerations is an animated short film about a religious mother and her very online daughter who independently obsess over two different sets of mysterious human remains: the relics of a beloved virgin Saint and the case file of an unidentified murder victim. Surreal and subtly comic, “Venerations” reflects on things like myth-making, materiality, and the strangeness of womanhood.

WITH TIME by Brit Fryer and Noah Schamus

Blending realism with fantasy, WITH TIME follows a group of trans people over fifty who have navigated shifting tides of acceptance and backlash as they gather in a storytelling workshop. Over several weeks, they transform open-ended prompts into scripted scenes, bringing to life moments of euphoria, connection, and mutual recognition.

The Elephant in the Room by Marley McDonald

The Elephant in the Room is a cinematic odyssey through the archives of The American Museum of Natural History. This archival adventure doc digs into the creation of the museum through the lens of its extraordinary artifacts and the people behind them. Through rare footage and forgotten narratives, the film challenges the myths and contradictions embedded in the museum’s quest to define our past.

THE ARBRASSON by Daniel Fishkin

In 2023, I discovered a new instrument called the Arbrasson—a notched wooden instrument that resonates like a singing bird when you caress its carved notches. When people hear it, they usually are surprised by how loud and clear its sound is, which does not seem to match its appearance: it looks like just a piece of wood with mysterious cuts in it—how could it sound like an electronic instrument?

There in Spirit by Derek Howard

There in Spirit is a short documentary about the psychic shops found all over Manhattan. Through readings conducted over the phone and in person in both audio and video, the film explores how the advice from these predominantly eastern European women helps New Yorkers cope with private and global challenges. Despite claims of prescience, this age-old fixture in New York is for entertainment purposes only, however many clients take their advice very seriously. The film examines the innate desire to want to believe predictions of the future, even when logic saws otherwise.

Discard Records by sTo Len

As Public Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation, sTo Len revitalized a dormant municipal television studio inside of a sanitation garage that was home to ostensibly the largest waste media archive in the world. Through watching and digitizing an estimated 500 hours of footage, Len has found training videos, union films, Public Service Announcements, interviews, environmental programs, cartoons, commercial campaigns, and TV news broadcasts that collectively tell the history of not only the world’s largest sanitation department but of New York City through the lens of its garbage. Discard Records is a very personal response to a treasure trove of historical material that explores the intimate but often ignored relationship between the public and their waste.

The Third Thing by Chloe Prasinos

The Third Thing is an autofiction podcast. The series personifies the intangible losses that happen when a relationship ends. Each episode drops the listener into the microcosm of a different relationship — a couple, best friends, a parent and child — and examines the inside jokes between two people that, over time, get more specific, evolving into a voice they do when they’re together, until that voice coheres into a fully realized character, complete with mannerisms and a backstory. This character is a third thing — a being who exists only when those two people are together. The series then asks the question: what happens to a third thing when a couple breaks up or friends drift apart? Where do they go? The pilot brings us there: a white, bureaucratic waiting-room called the Ephemeral DMV, where third things from around the world are waiting, telling their humans’ stories, praying that they reunite.

BLACKOUT by Caroline Pahl

On a sweltering August day in 2003, 50 million people across the Northeast were left powerless, including a New York still raw from 9/11. Before anyone knew it was an electrical collapse caused by a glitch in Ohio, terror felt inevitable. Told through archival footage, BLACKOUT captures those first hours of dread, and the surreal carnival that followed when New Yorkers realized the grid had simply failed.

There’s No Place by Bohdana Smyrnova

When Daryna, a Ukrainian refugee in the U.S., struggles with isolation and dislocation, she makes the radical choice to return with her children to war-torn Kyiv. There’s No Place is a portrait of resilience, revealing how community and belonging can feel safer than exile’s emptiness.

Daughter of the Mountains by Fatimah Asghar

Daughter of the Mountains explores reunion with homeland and alternative forms of family through the lens of grief and spirituality. Orphaned at a young age, author Fatimah Asghar lost ties to their ancestral homeland of Pakistan. Reuniting with their father’s family for the first time since his untimely death, the film explores what it means to rebuild family, ancestral connection and home, as well as the chosen family Fatimah has built in the United States.

Breeze the Gate by Mary Helena Clark

Breeze the Gate is an experimental narrative film about horse jockeys.

Book of Esther by Lu Olkowski

The audio documentary, Book of Esther, is named after a handmade, one of a kind, art book. It tells the story of two friendships, each between a woman and her much older friend.

Belly of a Glacier by Ohan Breiding

Belly of a Glacier is an experimental documentary that braids an ancient ice archive with a community-initiated project that insulates the Rhône Glacier from rising temperatures with a queer, speculative glacier funeral. In 2019, Iceland constructed the first memorial to mark the death of its Okjökul glacier. Since then, funerals have been held around the world to mark the melting of glacier bodies. These ritualized practices of collective grief perform the intimate entanglement of human and environmental well-being, and amplify the current state of climate emergency.

In the Keeping by Emily Drummer

In the Keeping offers a glimpse into the ponds and tanks where high value koi are bred, transported, exhibited, studied, and sold by a global community in pursuit of an ideal image in the body of a fish.

Ratas by Mauricio Arango

In a stark, imagined world, outcast rats navigate exclusion and violence. Through their struggle, this experimental film examines identity, marginalization, and what it truly means to belong.

All of the presenting artists in this program received a 2025 Support for Artists grant, administered through UnionDocs’ fiscal sponsorship program and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature

Bios

Zoe Beloff is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Her films are built on historical research and imaginative re-enactment. Zoe’s work has been featured in international venues that include the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center, the Berlinale, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, IFFR and FID Marseille.

Isaac Green Diebboll is a filmmaker, artist, and archivist based in Callicoon, NY. His films are explorations of the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of our humanity, looking at relationships to home, survival, and our connection with our environment. His creative practice includes drawing, writing and piano.

His current projects look at the destruction and legacy of public housing, the impact of incarceration on individuals and families, the intergenerational processes of preserving and cultivating Lenape language and oral tradition, and the life cycles and relationships that develop between earth, animals and farmers.

Isaac is a cofounder of ENGN (engine) an educational non-profit that supports public school students to explore their civic and creative interests. He has an MS in Urban Ecology from Parsons, The New School, a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and he works as a box office manager at The Callicoon Theater.

Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator / director / writer / musician / etc. She is the creator of “Agoraphilia,” a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film “Our Bed Is Green,” which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide, winning “Best Animation” at the Tacoma Film Festival. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital about mall kiosk owners. Before moving into animation, she created comics (some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Fader, Inverse, and other publications).

Brit Fryer (he/him) is a queer and trans filmmaker originally from Chicago’s South Side. He has directed several films, including THE SCRIPT, CARO COMES OUT, ACROSS, BEYOND, AND OVER, and most recently TESSITURA. His work has been supported by Yaddo, the Sundance Institute, Creative Culture, the PBS Ignite Mentorship, and HBO/The Gotham’s Documentary Development Initiative.

Noah Schamus (they/them) is a filmmaker of both documentary and narrative films and an educator. Their first feature, SUMMER SOLSTICE, screened at film festivals across the US and Europe before premiering theatrically at IFC Center in New York in June 2024. The film received a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Their most recent hybrid documentary short, THE SCRIPT, produced by Multitude Films as a part of their Queer Futures series, can currently be seen online on The New Yorker and The Criterion Channel.

Marley McDonald is a filmmaker, animator and painter living in Queens, New York. She directed and edited her debut feature-length documentary, Time Bomb Y2K for HBO. She has recently edited Earth to Michael which premiered at Telluride Film Festival 2025 and the generative documentary Eno which premiered at Sundance 2024. In 2021, she was chosen as a Points North Fellow and worked as an additional editor on Penny Lane’s film Listening to Kenny G. Her associate editor work includes Spaceship Earth which premiered at Sundance 2020, and the Golden Lion-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer of musical instruments. Daniel studied with composer Maryanne Amacher and with multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. He is the only luthier that studied directly with the daxophone’s inventor, Hans Reichel; Daniel’s instruments have traveled the world, including Canada, USA, Norway, Germany, France, Japan, Kazakhstan, and Australia. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, and earned his PhD in Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia. He has taught courses on instrument design, electronic music, and creative coding at many universities, including most recently at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he is Assistant Professor of Music Production.

Derek Howard is a New York City based director of photography, editor, and director, whose projects have screened at Venice, TIFF, Sundance, Telluride, DOCNYC, IDFA, and many others. Immersed in the world of creative documentary, video art, and hybrid formats, he established himself as a risk taking and innovative filmmaker with a focus on observational documentary, LGBTQ+ representation, dance, extreme nature, and climate change stories. He has participated in the IDFA Summer School, IDFAcademy, Reykjavik International Film Festival’s Trans Atlantic Talent Lab, Berlinale Talents, and the Playlab Filming in the Amazon residency with Apichatpong Weserthat. Recently, Derek shot celebrated visual artist Alison O’Daniel’s debut hybrid feature “The Tube Thieves” (Sundance 2023), and award-winning filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos’ “Plan C” (Sundance 2023).

sTo Len is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has centered on collaborations with abused landscapes, forgotten archives, municipal agencies, and invisible communities internationally. Recent works include printmaking with polluted waterways, 3D scanning Fresh Kills landfill, recycling waste from coastal cleanups into art materials, and hosting events at Superfund sites. Len was the first Artist in Residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Virginia and the Public Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation from 2021-2023. sTo Len is based in Queens, NY, with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions, and politics.

Chloe Prasinos is an independent writer, director, showrunner, and story editor working across genres. By day, she leads teams to report and produce longform audio documentaries, with clients like Apple, Topic Studios, and Wondery. Chloe is a founding producer of The 11th from Pineapple Street Studios, where her work was recognized with a National Magazine Award in Podcasting and Third Coast’s Director’s Choice Award, among other honors. Chloe also co-directed, produced, and sound designed Marvel Comics’ first ever audio drama, collaborating on set with the likes of Bob Balaban, Bill Irwin, and Celia Keenan-Bolger. Her work has appeared on Love + Radio, 99% Invisible, Reply All, CNN, NPR, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Bon Appetit, WBEZ, and beyond.

By night, Chloe performs longform improv at the Magnet Theater and standup around New York City. She has a degree in Choreography that she mostly uses at weddings.

Caroline Pahl is an Emmy Award-winning producer and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She’s made things for ABC News, Hulu, HBO, and VICE News.

Bohdana Smyrnova is an independent filmmaker specializing in intimate, female-driven narratives. As a writer, director, producer, and editor, she has developed an improvisational script development technique that creates space for actors to explore authentically on-screen. As a documentarian, she has been part of an Oscar-shortlisted film; a documentary series by a Sundance winner; and is producing a hybrid queer feature. Over 25 years, Smyrnova has held key creative positions on 50+ projects that have garnered 70+ awards and screened at 350+ festivals worldwide, including Rotterdam IFF, Clermont-Ferrand, Director’s Fortnight, Slamdance, Taipei Golden Horse, and French theatrical release. She holds an MFA from New York University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. An alumna of the Cannes Film Festival Residency and ScripTeast lab, she currently teaches at Chernivtsi University through Docutribe.
Smyrnova is developing her debut feature documentary There’s No Place. She is based between New York and Chernivtsi/Kyiv, Ukraine.

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer whose work includes an Emmy nominated web series, a National Book Award Longlisted book of fiction, a critically acclaimed book of poetry, and they served as the co-producer and writer of Time and Again for Ms Marvel on Disney +.

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working across film and installation. Her films have screened at festivals and venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Berlinale; New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Cinéma du réel, Paris; Viennale, Sundance Film Festival; ICA London; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York.

When not hosting CBC’s Love Me, Lu Olkowski is an independent producer and story editor. Over the last 25 years, her work has been featured on NPR, This American Life, Radiolab and others. She’s known for getting people to open up about uncomfortable things. As a story editor, she coaches teams of reporters, producers and hosts to create complex, multipart, documentary podcasts. She loves the wind. And is currently mesmerized by the sound of seals singing in the Bay of Fundy.

Ohan Breiding is a Swiss-American artist and filmmaker. Through photographic and filmic archives, video and collaboration they employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as witness. Most recently, their work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Arts and Letters, Hesse Flatow, Oceanside Museum (Getty PST), Frac des Pays de la Loire, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and ICA LA. Breiding is a 2025-2026 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardee. They have participated in residencies at Triangle Arts, Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), TBA-21 Academy Ocean Space, LMCC Governor’s Island, Millay Colony and Shandaken: Storm King. They are the recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, A.I.R. Fellowship, Hellman Award, Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award and a DAAD Award. Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles.

Emily Drummer is a filmmaker whose process-driven work is rooted in immersive fieldwork and historical research, reimagining cinematic conventions to craft meditative worlds that are deeply thought, felt, and sensed. She received her MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa and her BA from Hampshire College. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from MacDowell, New York State Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Princess Grace Foundation, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her short films Field Resistance (2020), Histories of Simulated Intimacy (2017), and Behind the Torchlight (2015) have been showcased by venues including Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Block Museum at Northwestern University, London Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, among others.

Mauricio Arango was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and lives and works in New York City. His films have been shown at festivals and art institutions including New Directors/New Films at MoMA and the Lincoln Film Society (New York), Kino der Kunst (Munich), FiD (Marseille), VideoBrasil (São Paulo), Rencontres Internationales (Paris), and IndieLisboa (Lisbon). He is an alumnus of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum and has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the MacDowell Artist Colony, and Museo El Barrio (New York). His work has been supported by organizations including The Foundation for Contemporary Art (New York), RivieraLab Coproduction Fund (Mexico), Filmmakers Fund, Rooftop Films (New York), Matt Roberts Arts (London), the Puffin Foundation, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Bush Foundation, The Jerome Foundation (New York), and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).