TV or Filmmaker
Melody Woodnutt
About
Specialising in 16mm analogue filmmaking I work to create short films that exude romance and otherworldlyness that lean into film's materiality – it's warmth, grain, occasional flicker, light flares and depths of colours. Creating surreal images on 16mm film also offers opportunities for printing cinematic still images as archival fine art photography.
With a deep pull towards unknowable realms such as the sea, cosmos, or spectral worlds, alongside explorations in love/intimacy, societal allegory, poetics, and the nature-culture symbiosis, the consequent art-films drift into otherworldy territories in parallel to my real encounters.
I have experience as a solo 16mm filmmaker and as an art director for small film productions. In a past life I was a festival programmer, curator, grant writer, artist residency coordinator and arts administrator.
I am currently an exhibiting member of Artist Film Workshop - an artist run film lab for analogue small gauge film. Biennially, I am the artistic director of international film platform and residency called 'The Weight of Mountains', which brings together filmmakers from all over the world to live temporarily in remote locations; utilising film as research in-the-field to explore psycho-geographies and connections between humanity and environment over temporal and geographic dis/connects.
My work has been shown with NGV/Melbourne Design Week, PICA (Oregon), Melbourne Fringe (Keynote curated by Emily Sexton and Martyn Coutts) and a variety of film festivals or venues in Melbourne, Brisbane, Dublin, London, as well as across multiple locations in USA, UK, Canada, Iceland, and Morocco. Supported with grants from Arts Queensland, Youth Arts Queensland, Creative Victoria, Menningarráð Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Vaxtarsamnigur Norðurlands Vestra (Iceland), Rannis Innovation+Research Triennial Funding (Iceland), and Kulturkontakt Nord (Baltic/Nordic EU). I have worked as the Director for Nes Artist Residency (Iceland); Artistic Direction and Regional Development Advisor for Thekkingarsetur Iceland (a research and development organisation under the Icelandic Ministry for Education and Culture); consultant for The Icelandic Textile Center (Iceland); Artistic Director of The Weight of Mountains (global ARI); Co-Director of Exist Live Art and Performance Art Collective (Australia); curator of the Summer We Go Public Festival (Iceland) and Site Exploratory Arts Festival (Iceland).