Sybille Bauer-Zierfuß, MA (she/her), is a (moving image) artist and is about to complete her doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her dissertation was supervised by Priv.-Doz. Mag. Dr. phil. habil. Ramón Reichert. In it, Bauer-Zierfuß examines the representation of autism in the media and the mechanisms of marginalization that particularly affect autistic women, (gender)queer individuals, and BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). She previously studied time-based media at the University of Art and Design Linz, graduating with honors. Her film and mixed media works depict confrontations with the uncomfortable. Through them, Bauer-Zierfuß takes an intimate, feminist look at the world of human emotions and experiences. She draws on language and text materials such as audio recordings of her grandmother, her late father's illness diary, and even the Bible. Thematically, her artistic practice deals primarily with autism, structural, sexualized, and emotional violence, queerness, (auto)biographies, death, and grief. Sybille Bauer-Zierfuß's works have been and continue to be exhibited nationally and internationally.
Nicole Bazuin is an award-winning Canadian film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Her first feature, Modern Whore, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5th, 2025, and is represented by Quiver Distribution and Protagonist Picks outside of North America. She directed the short films Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie, which premiered at Sundance and was named to TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten list for 2023, Modern Whore, which premiered at SXSW, and the CBC Short Doc Last Night at the Strip Club. She co-created and directed the series This Art Works! for CBC Arts and Climate Talks With Kids for The Image Centre. Nicole co-created and photographed the book Modern Whore: A Memoir (Penguin Random House Canada) with writer Andrea Werhun. Exhibitions include: Art Gallery of Ontario, Luminato, and Nuit Blanche.
Xenia Dürr (she/they) is deaf, queer, and white. They are a photographer and activist and were active in an association for deaf students for several years and worked as a sign language teacher in Vienna. They are currently pursuing a master's degree in “Art in Context” at the Berlin University of the Arts. Their photographic work revolves around socially critical topics such as audism and the related phonocentrism. Through photography, Xenia aims to raise awareness and encourage (primarily hearing) people to engage with and question these issues. In addition, Xenia regularly holds workshops critical of audism—mainly in the cultural sector—to sensitize hearing institutions to conscious interaction when working with deaf artists.
Evelyne Faye, born in France, is an award-winning director, author, and keynote speaker.
After studying economics and Romance languages in Germany, she delved into the documentary film industry, assuming various roles such as assistant director and production manager for numerous international productions. These roles led to multiple relocations before she finally settled in Vienna and joined the local Doctors Without Borders team. In 2016, after earning a master's degree in Intercultural Competence, she reignited her passion for filmmaking. The birth of her daughter Emma Lou in March 2012, diagnosed with Down syndrome, marked a pivotal moment in Evelyne's life. This experience redirected her career towards advocating for minorities, with a focus on promoting inclusion, tolerance, and diversity. Evelyne's debut documentary film "The Way You Shine" premiered in Austrian cinemas in 2023 and earned the Franz Grabner Award for Best Cinema Documentary Film of the year. Evelyne lives and works in Vienna with her three wonderful children. Her guiding principle is: "Each person should be considered as a universe with an infinity of possibilities."
Ella Glendining is a Writer/Director dedicated to telling authentic disabled stories. Her first feature, IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2023 as part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition, with its UK premier at Sheffield Doc Fest 2023. It has won a number of awards, including the Silver Horn for the director of a film on social issues at Krakow Film Festival 2023, the prestigious FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize, and the Bring the Change award at Biografilm Festival 2023, as well as receiving a special mention at Milwaukee Film Festival 2023. Ella has written/directed short films with backing from Film4, the BFI, Arts Council England, Screen South, and the National Paralympic Heritage Trust. Ella was named one of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow 2020. She is currently writing a feature fiction film called CURIOSITIES OF FOOLS for the BFI. Ella is also an Access Coordinator.
Christine Sun Kim is an American artist based in Berlin. Kim's practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL), the use of the body, and strategically deployed humor are all recurring elements in her practice. Working across drawing, performance, video and large scale murals, Kim explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large. Kim’s work has been extensively exhibited and performed internationally. She is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles, Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, and White Space Beijing in Beijing.
Seo Hye Lee is a deaf South Korean artist based in the UK. Drawing from her lived experience of hearing loss and as a cochlear implant user, she works across drawing, moving image, and multi-sensory installation to explore the intricate terrains of sound and silence. Her recent moving image work examines the language of captions through audio description, creative captioning, and sound cues—interweaving these elements with the atmospheric tradition of the shipping forecast. , a silent film that reconfigures archival footage through manipulated subtitles, exists both in silence and as an audio described version—inviting multiple sensory readings of sound, language, and emotional resonance. The work has been exhibited in MIMA’s Towards New Worlds, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Design & Disability exhibition, and Feeling. Art. We. All. Together. at Kunsthalle Bremen. Across her practice, Seo Hye champions accessibility and collaboration, drawing inspiration from both collective and personal encounters with sound. Her research and projects have been supported by the Vital Capacities Residency and Arts Council England’s DYCP programme.
Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationship between framing and support, historical and emotional debts, documentary and description. Their performance and video work has been shown at venues including Artists Space: Books & Talks, Camden Arts Centre, and DOC NYC, and they have been in study with the group No Total since 2012. They are currently working on an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.
Michelle Lyons is a writer and content creator based in Western Australia. A late-diagnosed autistic woman, Michelle is the proud mum of three amazing autistic children and wife to her equally amazing husband.
Her creative journey blends storytelling with advocacy. She writes heartfelt children’s stories and is the screenwriter behind a short film, Imposter inspired by her own life, which went on to win Best Screenplay 2024 at the Swan Perth International Women in Film Festival.
Andrés González Majul is a young director born in Caracas, Venezuela on June 25,1983, who has explored the dimension of video art since his early days. He holds a degree in Social Communication from the Andrés Bello Catholic University. He is a musician belonging to the National Orchestra System in the Simón Bolívar Big Band Jazz group. To date, his main interest has been to build bridges with the reality of others, focusing on exploring within his own introspection. The processes of self-review and, at times, raw exposure of his physical and psychological journeys have been for him the means of emancipation and personal evolution. His video art pieces such as “El Corset” (The Brace) 2007 and “Sed” (Thirst) 2011 were presented in academic exhibitions and respectively nominated at the renowned VIART Ibero American Film Festival.
Gabi Mathes studied directing at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Department of Film and Television, under Axel Corti and Peter Patzak. The short documentary “Bist du gelähmt” (Are you paralyzed?) won the award for screenplay and directing at the Vienna Student Film Festival. The found footage film “Eine Million Kredit ist ganz normal, sagt mein Großvater” (A million in credit is quite normal, says my grandfather) received the Diagonale Prize for Innovative Cinema (ex aequo) in 2006 as well as the CPH:DOX New Vision Award for short film (Copenhagen). “Flaschenpost” (Message in a Bottle) was awarded the Austrian Short Film Prize at VIS Vienna Independent Shorts. In 2013, Gabriele Mathes received the “outstanding artists award” for experimental film.
She is Filmmaker and screenwriter. 2006-2020, project manager of the short film festival “videoundfilmtage” in Vienna.
Philipp Muerling is performance artist and art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Since the renovation of the academy building on Schillerplatz, he has been drawing attention to the building's lack of barrier-free accessibility with his staircase performances.
Bernd Oppl lives and works in Vienna. His artistic practice – encompassing models, photographs, sound installations, and moving images presented as projections or on displays – fundamentally engages with the uncertainty of perception. In a world where the visible and audible are always both material and virtual, his works often inhabit an uncanny in-between space: simultaneously present and absent, tangible and ephemeral, external and internalized, all-encompassing and radically limited.
Alison O’Daniel is a d/Deaf visual artist and filmmaker. She builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary in her work that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the ear. Her film ‘The Tuba Thieves’ premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS and Arte in 2024. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles and is working on her second feature film. O’Daniel is the Suraj Israni Endowed Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Visual Arts department at University of California, San Diego.
Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist whose performances, public interventions, and curatorial projects explain aspects of disability culture such as interdependence, de-medicalization, and creative accessibility. His practice enlivens his 2015 Open Access manifesto—a set of guidelines that undermines dominant institutional frameworks by approaching accessibility as a “temporary, collectively held space.” Often emphasizing the possibilities of living on one’s own terms, his work offers a remedy for the complications of cultural ableism.
Mario_n Porten is a sculptor who makes films and experiences community work as a more important artistic practice. She deals with inclusions/exclusions within historical and contemporary queer and feminist movements. In her work as a personal assistant for people with disabilities, she was well prepared for life with a chronic illness. Now she is dealing with inclusions/exclusions within the healthcare system and learning to organize her crip time.
Liz Sargent is a Korean-American adoptee and award-winning filmmaker whose work delves into adoption, disability, and family dynamics. With a background in choreography, she brings emotional depth to her storytelling, shaped by her experience as the middle child of eleven in an intersectional family. A two-time NY EMMY winner (2020 & 2021), Liz is also a HALF Initiative Mentee (2022 & 2023), an MSSNG PCES AICP Mentee (2023), and NBCU's Launch Director (2024-2026). Her debut narrative short, Strangers' Reunion (2019), produced by Ritz-Carlton and Hearst under the mentorship of Mike Figgis, was an adoptee reunion film released in six languages worldwide. Her proof of concept, Take Me Home, premiered at Sundance (2023), won the Grand Jury Prize at American Cinematheque's PROOF FF (2024), and was the centerpiece at the White House to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Olmstead Act, where Liz and her sister, the film’s star, shared their stories with key officials. Take Me Home screened at over 50 festivals.
RA Walden is a transdisciplinary artist whose work centers a queer, disabled perspective on the fragility of the body. Their practice spans sculpture, installation, video, and printed matter, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology. Walden is interested in our ability and failure to navigate physicality, interdependency and vulnerability both communally and individually; understanding world-building not as a visionary tool for an imagined future, but as an embodied methodology for the now. Recent work has been shown at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art: UK, HAU: Berlin, The National Gallery of Australia, SOHO20: NYC, and Kunstinstituut Melly: Rotterdam. Walden has been a resident of Shandaken Storm King: NYC, Wysing Arts Centre: UK, Hebbel am Ufer: Berlin, and La Becque: Switzerland. Their solo exhibition access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing) opened in May 2023 at Storm King Art Center, NYC; in 2024 they presented a solo exhibition at Grundy Gallery, UK, titled object transformations through the co-ordinate of time.
“ I don’t use photos of myself for my practice, so please feel free to take any screenshots you’d like from the files in place of that.”
Jonah Wögerbauer began making films with friends at an early age. This collaboration gave rise to the film collective HAWARAFILM, in which he is still active. After graduating from high school in Vienna, he made his first short film, "Unerhört" (2019), in which a conductor and a deaf dancer try to find a common language. This was followed in 2022 by "Marija" and the comedy "Portrait of a Family". Jonah has been studying directing at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF since October 2023. His first-year-film “where we belong” premiered in 2025 at the Festival Premiers Plans in Angers.