Pronouns: they, them, theirs
I am a queer, nonbinary filmmaker, editor, director, artist, educator, facilitator, and space holder with 15 years of experience in documentary, narrative, and experimental film, education, and community building.
As an editor, I am highly organized, technically skilled, boldly creative, and ethically dedicated. I have edited commercially for a range of clients including MTV, Refinery 29, Nickelodeon, Food Network, Condé Nast, NBC Universal, multiple short narrative, documentary, and experimental films, and as a primary editor on the feature documentary, Roleplay.
As a director, I am a rigorous steward of vision, an attentive and compassionate leader, and a facilitator of emergent processes for storytelling and collaboration. My directing work includes short narrative films and award winners such as the kinky TV pilot, Mercy Mistress, and documentary projects, A Spell For Queer Home, Home Abyss and Dear Elsa: 10 Letters + 10 Experiments.
I have exhibited work in SXSW, DOCNYC, the Pride, Athens International Film & Video, Thomas Edison, Big Muddy, Brooklyn Women’s, Outgaze, Asian American International, Splice, Newark International, Damn These Heels Queer, Merced Queer, and Imagine This Womxn’s International Film Festivals, NewFilmmakers Los Angeles, The Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image, Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, Queer Spectra Arts Festival, NOFLASH Video Show, Hyperreal Film Club’s HYPERDRIVE series, Landscape x Olympia video residency at Elsewhere, on FemmePowerTV, and at the Museum of Sex and Performance Space.
As an educator and facilitator, my vision is to create space and impetus for other artists to engage in thoughtful, intentional, and creative risk-taking and reflection with a lens toward challenging the ways oppressive systems manifest and collectively using art to imagine and catalyze new futures. I have put this vision into practice through teaching filmmaking at Reel Works, Hunter College, and Spy Hop Productions and Reflection Collective, a series of workshops and offerings that explore DIY and experimental filmmaking practices with a focus on exploration, introspection, and connection.
I hold a BA in Film from Montana State University and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.
I am currently the Artist Foundry Manager at the Utah Film Center, which provides artist support to local filmmakers and creators.
I am also the co-facilitator of iowahouseSLC, a queer and trans community building project in Salt Lake City.
My artistic approach explores evolutions of intimacy, identity, body, and connection by utilizing practices of performance, embodiment, multiplicity, experimentation, and magic in the processes, stories, and experiences I choose to steward. I seek to create work that provides questions rather than answers, points of connection rather than completed paths, and exists in the cracks between art and life, subject and collaborator, narrative and performance, and the community and materials with which they are made. I am interested in using image and sound as material to shift time and memory, seek the unknown, gently disrupt consciousness, and in doing so, create space for new possibilities of being and connecting. Everything I create seeks to queer both the process and the content. I am rooted in my belief that video is a portal for breaking binaries, creating embodied experience, and a way to see and be seen. My films, projects, workshops, offerings, and spaces are reflections, openings, and spells, ways to see ourselves, question, and imagine, to hold nuance, complexity, and fluidity, to be in community.
PRESS
Reflection collective
SLUG STYLE: AMANDA MADDEN – SLUG Magazine
Workshops for independent, do-it-yourself filmmakers set for Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival, courtesy of Utah Film Center’s Artist Foundry – The Utah Review
A SPell for queer home:
NewFilmmakers LA Announces Nominees And Jury For 12th Annual Awards (Exclusive) – Variety
A detailed rundown of the slate of films for the 2023 Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival of the Utah Film Center – The Utah Review
NFMLA LGBTQ+ Cinema Shares Stories Centering Queer Joy – MovieMaker
Water-Efficient Landscapes, A Spell for Queer Home, Clean the Darn Air on This Week in Moab – KZMU Radio
IOWAHOUSESLC:
Breaking Bread as a Strategy for Resilience: Iowa House – SLUG Magazine
At Iowa House, queer Utahns find a place to be themselves over Sunday dinner – The Salt Lake Tribune
TEACHING:
Spy Hop Productions to mark 20th anniversary of PitchNic with Nov. 3 premiere of four student-produced short films – The Utah Review
Four excellent November programs: …Spy Hop’s 20th anniversary PitchNic – The Utah Review
DEAR ELSA:
Integrated Media Arts MFA Program Holds First Virtual Thesis Show – The Envoy
Outgaze Film Festival provides new insights into modern feminism – ViaNolaVie
MERCY MISTRESS:
‘Mercy Mistress’ Is The Kinky, Queer, Sex-Positive Dominatrix Show We've Been Waiting For – Playboy
‘Mercy Mistress’ Exclusive: Margaret Cho-backed Web Series About a Queer Asian Dominatrix – IndieWire
We’re Head Over Heels for This Queer BDSM Web Series – them.
Margaret Cho Hopes The BDSM Web Series She’s Producing Shatters Stereotypes About Asian Women’s Sexuality – Buzzfeed News
Queer Dominatrix Yin Q Is Shattering Asian Stereotypes – Paper Magazine
This BDSM Dominatrix Says Vanilla People Could Learn A Few Things From Kink – Refinery 29
New Web Series Mercy Mistress Explores the Crossroads of BDSM & Asian Femininity – OUT Magazine
Margaret Cho to Executive Produce MERCY MISTRESS – BroadwayWorld TV
Mercy Mistress’ is the sex-positive web series about BDSM that we need right now – HuffPost
Three Distinctions Between Mercy Mistress and Big Media’s Take on Kink – HoneySuckle Magazine
‘Mercy Mistress’ Is A Show About Reclaiming Queer Asian Femme Sexuality – NYLON Magazine
Queer Pro Dom Yin Q On Consent, BDSM, and Telling Their Story in ‘Mercy Mistress’ – INTO Magazine
Give Margaret Cho a Hand: Comic Talks New Kink Series, Queer Sex & Hollywood Homophobia – Pride Source
Mercy Mistress: life through a queer and kinky lens – April Magazine
Why I Made a Show About My Life as a Kink Dominatrix – A Women’s Thing
NAMES OF WOMEN:
Why Being Open About Abortion Is the Most Powerful Statement a Woman Can Make, According to This Filmmaker – Well + Good
THE THINGS I WANT TO TELL YOU:
Utah Arts Festival: Fear No Film NERVE Program – Salt Lake City Weekly