With enormous pleasure, Light Work announces the finalists for Urban Video Project’s 2027 Residential Commission! The selection process was highly competitive with many outstanding proposals. Shortlist selection was made by a jury including Mira Adoumier, Nicolas Baird, and Light Work UVP program director, Anneka Herre.

Selected finalists include:

  • Maya Jeffereis
  • Angelo Madsen
  • Jenny Perlin
  • Fred Schmidt-Arenales + Traci Hercher
  • John Torres

Getting to this stage of the competition proves these artists had an extraordinarily compelling proposal and work sample. Stay tuned for more announcements!

ABOUT THE JURY

Mira Adoumier (b. 1985, New York) is a filmmaker, visual artist and researcher based in Oslo, whose work is shaped by her experience of growing up in exile, moving across cultures, continents, and languages. Drawing on her academic studies in cinema, philosophy, biology, and psychology, her films explore landscapes at the intersection of center and periphery, real and imagined, weaving the multiple relationships between image, text, voice, and sound. A member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Nour Ouayda, Mira is also a guest lecturer at Nordland Kunst- og Filmhøgskole in Kabelvåg, Norway. In addition, she programs and curates films for art institutions and festivals and does the cinematography for artist films.

Nicolas Baird is a paleobiologist, artist, writer, and performer living in New York City, currently studying for a doctorate in Earth and Environmental Sciences. They make art and science that frame the world as a network of strange kin. In their art, they explore mutability and adaptation through photography, poetry, and performance. In their science, Baird looks back in time to understand how bodies, landscapes, and climate influence each other. Baird unites these themes as co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, a continuously evolving collaborative organism that creates and commissions artworks as tools for building multispecies futures.

Maya Kaminishi Jeffereis is Japanese-Indian-American artist and filmmaker whose work in video installation and experimental film brings overlooked histories to light and speaks to archival gaps through counter narratives, ancestral histories, and speculative fictions. My maternal family emigrated from Hiroshima and Kagoshima to work on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. My paternal family is Khoja Muslim from Gujarat who intermarried with colonial Scottish lighthouse keepers off the coast of Bombay during the British Raj.

Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including the MFA Boston, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, The Noguchi Museum, Queens Museum, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Columbus Museum of Art, among other institutions. Her work has screened in international film festivals including Images Festival, Third Horizon Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and Cosmic Rays. Jeffereis has been an artist-in-residence at International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), Pioneer Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (LMCC), Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Creative Research Grant and Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. She teaches art, art history, and Asian American Studies at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Hunter College.

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, ruralness, and the politics of desire. Madsen’s works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Moving Image, and dozens of documentary, LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and has participated in residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, “North By Current” (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes.

Jenny Perlin’s practice in film, visual art, works with and against documentary traditions, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to engage issues around truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the fragments of everyday life. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her PhD from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Perlin’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York, Berlin, Rotterdam Film Festival, and others. In addition to her work as an artist, writer, and educator, Perlin is director of The Hoosac Institute, a platform for text and image focusing on works that exceed or challenge conventional disciplinary narratives.

 

Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker working across participatory non-fiction film, experimental narrative film, and video installation. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented solo exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), Visual Arts Center (Austin), Galveston Artist Residency (Galveston), and The Power Station (Dallas). He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and The Bronx Museum (New York), The Logan Center for the Arts and ACRE Projects (Chicago), The Darling Foundry (Montreal), LightBox, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi, and The School District of Philadelphia (Philadelphia), Artspace (New Haven), The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest (Houston), Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien (Graz), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna). His film Committee of Six was awarded a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
Traci Hercher is a filmmaker and educator based in New York whose work explores systems of power and belief through portraiture. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, residencies at MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and NARS Foundation, as well as grants from Lightpress and the Puffin Foundation. Her films have screened internationally at festivals and venues including The DocYard, Walker Art Center, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Art Center, Experiments in Cinema, Process Festival, Revolutions per Minute Festival, AcreTV.org, Artists’ Television Access, The Nightingale, and Poetics and Politics Documentary Research Symposium at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

John Torres (b. 1975) is an independent filmmaker, musician, and writer. He co-runs Los Otros, a space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentation, weaving narratives of love, family relations, and memory into current events, hearsays, and folklore. He was a Featured Artist at the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar, and his work has been the subject of special profiles at the Viennale (2013) and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2024). He has directed five feature films, including Todo Todo Teros (Dragons & Tigers Award, Vancouver IFF; NETPAC/FIPRESCI, Singapore IFF), Years When I was a Child Outside (Berlinale Forum Expanded), and Lukas the Strange (Art of the Real, Lincoln Center). His short works include We Still Have to Close Our Eyes (TIFF Wavelengths).