04:38 min. | 16mm film
Dwell:ing is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Dwell in Possibility” and the poet’s lifelong engagement with botany and the natural world. The work treats text as both language and material—written, scratched, imprinted, and transformed through light, motion, and time.
Garden imagery is created through eco-friendly filmmaking processes using plant-based ingredients. Sunlight, soil, and weather leave physical traces on the film stock, introducing organic distortions that shape its visual language.
Drawing on Dickinson’s vision of “possibility,” Dwell:ing invites reflection on creative inquiry, perception, and our relationship with the environments that sustain and shape us.
This film was created as a commission for the Alexandria Museum of Art.
Production Artists: Annabella Gonzalez and Sierra Fuentes
4-min. | single channel video
The “tiny red dot” in this film is represented by a ladybug, a universal symbol of transformation and “good luck”. Referencing a quote from Carl Sagan, the film invites viewers to pause, make correlations, and observe our planet not just from the vast distance of outer space, but also from a close-up perspective—underneath the rocks, leaves, sand, and soil. The film collages 4K video, manipulated analog footage, source clips from NASA, and other imagery to poetically reflect on time and space intersections.
Audio by Sherman Finch | Finalist for the 2025 Cinespace Film Competition
05:28 min. | 16mm film scanned t0 HD video
“yard: work” is a 16mm experimental film created about and with my backyard, investigating the space as a site of visual and material inquiry. The film incorporates non-toxic, plant-based development processes, with ingredients sourced directly from the yard itself. Combined with other eco-friendly techniques, the film’s own materiality reflects the same cycles of attention, labor, and regeneration that define the act of tending a yard: intimate, imperfect, and ongoing.
A commission for the 2026 Fluxus Museum Prize in Experimental Video, Greece.
7 min | mixed-media film |
collaboration with Meg Cook and Courtney Starrett
Komboloi (worry beads) is a video poem that merges experimental film and animation techniques to explore anxiety in the era of climate change.
Central to the film is the symbolic use of worry beads—a cross-cultural object used to calm anxiety. Crafted from ice formed from local water sites, these beads embody the fragility of our planet and serve as a visual and thematic focal point.
Guided by a Fluxus-inspired procedural poem and an original musical score, Komboloi invites reflection on ecological grief, impermanence, and the urgent need for both individual and collective action.
Voice Performance by Riti Sachdeva
Original music by Lynn Vartan
03:22 | 16mm and Super 8mm scanned to HD video |
An experimental film that unfolds as a glimpse into the creative process: a sketch, a vignette, a visual mind map, and a meditation on how to document a planet in flux.
In this piece, the materiality of film becomes a metaphor for time, impermanence, and the fragility of the natural world. Working with Super 8mm and 16mm footage, the image itself carries traces of transformation, decay, and memory, blurring the boundaries between document and artifact. A sense of anxiety and urgency shapes the work, leaving us uncertain whether we are witnessing the past, the present, or a message from the future. Ultimately, the film asks how cinema can hold onto a world that is continually changing, and what remains when both landscapes and images begin to disappear.
“Sun Mapping” is an experimental video that animates the pathway of the sun juxtaposed with imagery of natural specimens collected along a coastal setting. The project, a unique merging of analog and digital processes, is a poetic exploration of the symbiotic relationship between the oceanfront landscape, its ecosystem, and the greater cosmos. Musical score created by Sherman Finch.
Originally commissioned for the Port of Authority Building in Corpus Cristi, TX, the project was curated by Mary Magsamen and sponsored by The Aurora Picture Show and The Weingarten Art Group. photo credit: Mary Magsamen
Production Artists: Annie Sungkajun, Eman Zubeidi, and Drew Gillie
3-min | single channel video | collaboration with Meg Cook
Originally created for a Houston city public art project, Steinke and Cook merge the micro with the cosmic in their film U-SCOPIC. Drawing inspiration from microscopic creatures that live among us and source material from the NASA archives, the artists animate new forms using various experimental techniques. In this piece, circular orbs morph in and out of focus, resembling specimens in a petri dish, a starry galaxy, or bubbly particles floating in space.
5-min. | single channel video
“Lifeline” is an abstract visualization of the flow of water. In this piece, samples (represented as lines in the video) were extracted from footage of various bodies of water. Similar, in a way, to a doctor drawing blood or a scientist collecting water specimens to test the health of a lake. In the resulting work, the layered audio of a heartbeat draws parallels to the human body as lines move across the composition like veins or air passages.
Audio by Sherman Finch
9-min. | analog film collaged into HD single channel film
“Although it plays with various digital techniques, interdisciplinary artist Krista Leigh Steinke’s experimental short is a homage to the material history of cinema. It especially illuminates the labor and skill of women in the early twentieth-century motion picture industry as editors and colorists”.
(from program website: In the Hole, Triple Canopy Presents, curated by Yasmina Price, BAM, 2025)
10 min. and 16 min. version | single channel video
“Sun Notations” is an experimental video that animates over 50 still photographs – a work that merges a primitive photographic process (pinhole) with new media. The original photographs capture the pathway of the sun rising and setting over time, with exposures that last one day up to an entire year. Here time and space expand, overlap, and then dissipate as clusters of dust appear like stars, the landscape morphs into abstraction, and the sun traces across the screen like a drawing in motion. Throughout the work, references to creation and destruction call attention to our immediate present but also to the grim possibility that our planet may not have a forever.
Audio by Matt Steinke
Production Assistant: Ashley Lane and Annie Sungkajun
Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Republic of Korea
Public outdoor screening during the 2019 ISEA conference, Asia Culture Center Media Wall, Gwangju, Republic of Korea, June 22-28, 2019. 16 min. video created from animated still solargraphs of the sun's pathway. Special modified format to accommodate dimensions of the media wall.
01:00 | Single Channel HD Video
A fleeting study of a moth wing, this one-minute film explores transformation through extreme close-ups, shifting textures, and evolving patterns. The familiar becomes abstract as the wings gradually change, creating a hypnotic atmospheric meditation on beauty fragility, and impermanence.