2026-27, work in progress, approximately 65 minutes, 4K digital video. Collaboration with Erin O’Connor.
The film explores the co-becoming of humans and minerals, following quartz and related materials from their geological origins toward glassmaking. Made in collaboration with sociologist, ethnographer, and glassblower Erin O’Connor.
2026, 46 minutes, panoramic video with live musical performance. Music by Sebastian Currier. Premiere September 2027, Germany.
Created in dialogue with Sebastian Currier’s music, The Seasons uses a panoramic, gently curving, 6:1 aspect ratio image to bring labor, landscape, industry, and human activity into simultaneous relation. The piece will also exist as a cinematic work and as an installation.
2019, 83 minutes, digital video. Producer Narimane Mari, sound mix by Ernst Karel. Made possible by a Fulbright grant to India.
Shot in Varanasi and Kannur, Kerala, Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work approaches Indian labor through intimate portraits of workers—from boatmen and teachers to doctors performing cancer surgery. Through sustained attention to workers and their environments, the film affirms the inherent dignity of labor.
2014, 23 minutes, 5K digital video. Cinematography by Sergei Franklin, sound by Ernst Karel.
Made in collaboration with Toby Lee and Ernst Karel, Single Stream is set within a materials recovery facility. It observes workers, machinery, and recyclable waste as discarded materials are sorted, compressed, and redirected into new use.
2017, 91 minutes, digital video, 16mm film. Produced by Athina Tsangari, HAOS Film, Train-Tracks, Inc. Editing Ian Hassett. With Ram Dass, Sarah Grossman, Doris Johnson, Matt Freedman, Carol Virostek.
Co-directed with John Bruce, End of Life is the product of six years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. In preparation for this project, the filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and co-created hundreds of hours of interactions within collaborative exchanges.
2009, 38 minutes, 360-degree panoramic video and sound installation. Sound by Stephen Vitiello, producer Denise Markonish and MASS MoCA.
Below Sea Level is a 360-degree panoramic video installation inspired by 19th-century cycloramas. Viewers enter a cylindrical environment surrounded by a continuous, slowly revolving landscape of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. Below Sea Level reflects on New Orleans as a place shaped by impermanence, resilience, celebration, and environmental uncertainty.
2010, 29 minutes (loop), 5-channel installation
Soundscape by Stephen Vitiello
Software design/Tech assistance: Gian Pablo Villamil
Audio recording by Paul Geluso (Harvestworks)
Suzanne Kim, curator, Smack Mellon
Kathleen Gilrain, director, Smack Mellon
At the Still Point is a five-channel video installation bringing together images of shipbreaking, laundry work, construction, and cremation rites in India. Tall vertical projections appear in changing combinations, while Stephen Vitiello’s soundscape binds together tools, water, machinery, voices, and ritual. The work considers labor, destruction, death, and renewal through a condition of profound stillness.
2010, 19 minutes, digital video and panoramic video adapted to cinema screen. With live or pre-recorded musical performance. Music by Sebastian Currier
Next Atlantis (2010) is a video and sound collaboration between composer Sebastian Currier and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik that explores the environmental impermanence of New Orleans and its rapidly eroding wetlands. Premiered by the American Composers Orchestra, the piece merges symphonic music with electronic sounds to juxtapose intimate human portraits with the region's industrial and ecological fragility.
2011-24, 9 minutes, digital video.
Music by Stephen Vitiello
Inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “The Nine Gates of Your Body,” Nine Gates moves in extreme close-up across the openings of a lover’s body. At this scale, familiar anatomy becomes texture, movement, and landscape. The work brings erotic intimacy into relation with vulnerability, trust, and mortality.
Pigs
2007-10, 8 minutes, SD video
Pigs looks closely at animals living on a farm in Las Vegas. They appear alone, in small groups, wallowing in mud, and in the wildness of feeding frenzy. In one prolonged enigmatic shot, a pig returns the viewer’s gaze.
Nascentes Morimur
2008-13, 19 minutes, digital video, SILENT
Nascentes Morimur observes an actual autopsy through close and carefully composed views. The body emerges gradually from darkness, and familiar anatomy becomes strange. I was drawn to the autopsy because it presented the most extreme test: could sustained looking lessen my fear of death and my sense of separation from what I saw?
2005-07, 10 minutes 30 seconds, SD video
Music by Sebastian Currier
Naked observes a colony of naked mole rats living in a network of transparent laboratory tubes. Blind and highly social, the animals work, rest, play, struggle, and organize themselves around a queen. The film moves from estrangement toward intimacy, allowing their enclosed world to appear at once alien, social, and deeply familiar.
2006, 22 minutes, digital video. Text by Ginger Strand, voice by Kyle DeCamp, music by Tim Partridge.
Filmed primarily in Alaska, The Aquarium contrasts the openness of the Arctic landscape with the confinement of sea mammals in captivity. Looking beyond the spectacle of the aquarium, the film reflects on habitat destruction, human control, and the animals’ resistance. Inspired by Ginger Strand’s essay “Why Look at Fish?”
Dark Sun Squeeze
2003, 10 minutes, SD video
Dark Sun Squeeze moves through the luminous interior of a sewage-treatment plant, where water, waste, machinery, and reflected light form a continuously shifting visual field. The film transforms matter commonly associated with disgust into something gleaming, fluid, and difficult to name. It asks how sustained attention can alter the boundary between attraction and repulsion.
