Handmade Cinema and Gendered Narratives: A Conversation with Stacey Steers
forthcoming Fall 2026
In this MAST Open Channel conversation, experimental filmmaker and animator Stacey Steers joins MAST editor Maryam Muliaee to discuss her slow, handmade animation practice, archival appropriation, and the reworking of female figures from early cinema and gendered narratives.
About MAST Open Channel
MAST Open Channel is a curated editorial series featuring artists, filmmakers, scholars, writers, curators, and practitioners working across media, art, science, and technology. Open Channel conversations are published in video, audio, and edited textual formats and are assigned permanent digital object identifiers.
About the Guest
Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. Steers’ films have screened widely at venues including the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors New Films (New York), IFFR Rotterdam, Locarno IFF, MoMA and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). Recently she has expanded her work to include collaborative installations that join invented, three-dimensional production elements with film loops, creating a new context for experiencing her films. Steers is a recipient of major grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital and the American Film Institute. She is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in Boulder, CO.
About the Host
Dr. Maryam Muliaee is a media artist-scholar, and the co-founding editor of MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory. For the past sixteen years, she has developed research-based art grounded in archival research, community storytelling, interviews and sustained collaboration with nonprofit, cultural, advocacy, and mission-driven organizations in the United States and internationally. She is the editor of Media Thinking: Theory by Other Means (forthcoming from Bloomsbury’s Thinking Media series, 2027). Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, museum publications including Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Pompidou), and edited volumes published by major academic presses. Her creative practice spans video art, sound installation, experimental animation, and locative media, which has been funded, screened, and exhibited internationally since 2006.
