Students

Clark Comstock is a director, editor, and cinematographer. He is a graduate of the Media Production program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and a two-time winner and four-time nominee of various NATAS Ohio Valley Chapter College Student Production Awards. He is also the recipient of their inaugural Board of Governors Scholarship. His work has been featured at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival and the 2024 Atlanta Film Festival. He is a co-founder of the Night Moves Film Collective.

Esteban Agudelo Franco (b. 1998) is an artist and filmmaker born in Bogotá, Colombia. His practice spans drawing, printmaking, video, and film, all rooted in a search to reinterpret everyday visual language and propose new forms of interaction through imagery—an invitation to commune within the shared archive. 

Francisca Jiménez (b. 1993, Colombia) is a visual artist, film director, and editor. Her works explore the intersections of expanded cinema, photography, research, and printed editorial production. Her practice explores aesthetic gestures formed within vast political, historical, natural, and emotional ecosystems, where diverse readings of Latin American landscapes and conflicts converge.  

Her films have been screened at international festivals such as the San Sebastián Film Festival (Spain), FICCI (Colombia), MIDBO (Colombia), FICUNAM (Mexico), TIFF (Albania), Frontera Sur (Chile), Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina), FESTIFREAK (Argentina), and the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Argentina). In the art sphere, her work has been exhibited in Bogotá, Cartagena, New York, San Juan, Buenos Aires, Toronto, and London.  

Thanks to national (Colombian) and international grants, she has developed artistic and pedagogical projects with a strong focus on artistic circulation and engagement with diverse audiences. In 2020, she won the Arte Joven Colsanitas Award (First Place). She has also been awarded the 2023 Circulation Grant from the Colombian Ministry of Culture, the 2022 Salón de Arte Joven Galería Santa Fe Creation Grant, and the 2022 National Residency Grant in Visual Arts. She has participated in international residencies in Canada, Argentina, Germany, Spain, and Colombia.

Her work has been part of the private collection of the Colombian Central Bank Museum since 2022. She is currently in the development stage of her feature film, All the Beasts in the World.

Kim Haewon (b. 1997) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker whose practice incorporates video, photography, and installation. His work is rooted in the core themes of identity and relationships, aiming to articulate these concerns through moving images. His projects closely observe the small actions of people. He is especially interested in capturing subtle cultural distinctions evident in people’s accents, movements, the nuances of their language, and their diverse approaches to various situations.

Mingyang Pan (b. 2003, Henan, China) is a writer and 2D animator. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation (FVNMA) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Her practice centers on storytelling across short fiction and animation. Her writings have appeared in youth journals, while her animations have received awards in British Columbia and been screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF). She is also working as a screenwriter, further expanding her exploration of narrative across mediums.

Zhou Xing is an independent filmmaker and creative producer who graduated from the University of Toronto and is now pursuing further studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work focuses on the narrative complexities of human relationships that explores humanity and philosophical themes. His films linger in the cracks between silence and impulse, between intention and accident, inviting viewers into a state of quiet disorientation.

Brittney Chantele is a New York-born, Pittsburgh-raised, multidisciplinary artist and US Army veteran whose work critiques the military-industrial complex while centering healing, Queerness, and community. Their practice spans music, film, painting, ceramics, poetry, and performance. Brittney was the lead actor in an Emmy Award-winning commercial for the Western Pennsylvania Boys & Girls Club and was voted Pittsburgh’s Best Hip-Hop Artist. Their work often draws on lived experience with disability, biracial identity, and veteranhood to interrogate structures of power and imagine more liberatory futures.

Yidan Chen is an artist working in experimental moving image and new media, with a practice spanning installation, sculpture, animation, and sound art. Her work investigates identity, cultural translation, and modes of perception through the deconstruction and reconfiguration of materials and media. At the threshold between the real and the virtual, Yidan creates immersive spaces that embrace uncertainty and resonance.

Yongfeng jumps into the filmmaking and art world with an engineering background from Guangzhou, China. Currently based in Chicago, he focuses on narrative films while also creating experimental videos, documentaries, and video games in his leisure.

Jay Wei is a Taiwan-born moving image artist and researcher whose practice spans narrative and documentary shorts, experimental films, performance, and video installations, alongside years of film criticism writing. With a background in psychology and sociology, he grounds his work in field research and sociological theory, using reflexive and experimental audiovisual forms to examine how contemporary images—and the mechanisms that produce them—intersect with national and class identity.

Lee Yun (b. 1998, Taiwan) is a media artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, video installation, and real-time audiovisual systems. Working at the intersection of experimental cinema, media archaeology, and performance, Yun explores how figures and gestures in moving images translate across temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts. His work engages themes of memory, identity, historical rupture, and diasporic longing. 

Originally trained in narrative filmmaking, Yun’s practice shifted toward experimental and research-driven forms during their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, following a BA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong. Grounded in editing as both technique and philosophical inquiry, Yun employs repetition, fragmentation, and media translation to destabilize linear narrative structures.

His recent projects include installations and films that reframe historical trauma, explore emotional states like loneliness, and experiment with non-linear temporality and media layering. Yun’s research into real-time image systems has led to the development of a flicker-based editing tool, used in both installation contexts and live performances with their audiovisual ensemble, WNTSAD.

Yun’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Gene Siskel Film Center, Elastic Arts, Comfort Station, and Fotoaura Institute of Photography, with recognition from Festival Tous Courts, Internationales Trickfilm-Festival Stuttgart, Florence Film Awards, and the Rome Prisma Film Awards. Currently based in Chicago, Yun continues to investigate how cinematic gestures activate spaces of translation between bodies and images, history and present, presence and absence.

Sage Lin is a non-binary Taiwanese artist and director based in Chicago, creating animations, installations, and videos that utilize dynamic visuals, soundscapes, and dialogue to delve into the realm of memories and my trilingual background built by Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English. Sage re-examines the cultural, textural, and fragile aspects contained in language use in life. Their works merge elements in 2D media and also with found objects, fiber and paper materials, and explore how to gather fragments from personal experiences, reassembling emotions and time through forms such as reorganization, repetition, or extension to create unique ways of reading memories.

Nitya Mehrotra is an Indian filmmaker, animator, and oral historian, currently based in Chicago. Her work sits at the intersection of animation, documentary, and trauma-informed care, using storytelling to transform personal testimony into public memory. She is the founder of Stories by Strangers, a global platform that turns anonymous survivor stories of sexual and mental abuse into collaboratively made 2D animations. Since 2020, the platform has received over 20,000 submissions, reached 3 million viewers across 20+ countries, built a community of nearly 40,000 members, and featured in the Chicago Tribune. 

In 2024, she led a citywide train-wrap project in Chicago in collaboration with the city’s youth, featured in The New York Times, Time Out, and CBS. Her work has received the Best Cinematographer award at the Shawna Shea Festival, three Best Photojournalism awards from the Illinois College Press Association, the Women in Media Full Scholarship at Met Film School Berlin, and the New Artists Full Scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mehraneh Salimian is an Iranian filmmaker, editor, and writer working across documentary, video installation, and fiction film. Her practice centers on the concept of the counter-archive, particularly in Iran, where she creates alternative narratives to challenge dominant historical accounts. She works extensively with family photographs and personal archives, reflecting on memory, unrecorded histories, and political erasure.

Experienced in 16mm filmmaking, her analog practice engages with the question of how the act of remembering can be a tactile, sensory experience. By hand-processing, layering, and physically altering 16mm film, she makes textured narratives that give form to memory. Her work has been presented at Oscar-qualifying film festivals worldwide and exhibited at EXPO Chicago, Northwestern’s Dittmar Gallery, and SAIC’s SITE Gallery. Mehraneh holds a BA in Cinema Directing from Tehran University of Art and an MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danielle Vishlitzky is an experimental filmmaker and audio-visual artist based between Massachusetts and Chicago. Combining analog and digital techniques, her work explores the human body, family dynamics, and the feeling of being haunted.