Dr Andrea Zimmerman

Biography

I am a Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi layered practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Through my practice I ask how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography. My films, I hope, contribute attention to the under-expressed intersection of public and private memory with itinerant lives, human and otherwise and often in relation to structural and political violence. My practice employs imaginative hybridity and narrative re-framing, alongside reverie and a creative waywardness - processes where radical encounters use filmmaking practice as a form of social dreaming.

I am currently working on Wayfaring Stranger, a major feature and installation commission by The Wapping Project (2023).

Films include the award winning Artangel-produced 'Here for Life' (2019), which received its world premiere in the Cineasti Del Presente international competition of the Locarno Film Festival, 'Erase and Forget' (2017), premiering at the Berlin Film Festival (nominated for the Original Documentary Award), 'Estate, a Reverie' (2015) (nominated for Best Newcomer at the Grierson awards) and 'Taskafa, Stories of the Street' (2013), written and voiced by the late John Berger.

Selected exhibitions include 'Shelter in Place', Estuary 2021, 'Civil Rites', the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, 'Common Ground' at Spike Island, Bristol and 'Real Estates' at Peer Gallery. Andrea co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary 'The Look of Silence').

I co-edited the books 'Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain' (Myrdle Court Press) and 'Doorways: Women, Homelessness Trauma and Resistance' (House Sparrow Press) and have published extended essays in 'Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter', 'Open Democracy', 'La Furia Umana', ‘Another Gaze’, among others.

My work is held in the Arts Council Collection, the BFI National Archive, and libraries internationally.

I grew up on a council estate and left school at 16 due to not fitting into mainstream education.

My research interests include:
Co-existence (including more-than-human subjectivities), filmmaking as engaged social and political practice, participatory re-enactment, military/spectacular relations, imaginative hybridity and narrative de-framing in documentary practice, forms of reverie, class and culture, social and environmental justice, place and senses of belonging.

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