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doors 6:30pm, screening 7pm, followed by discussion
Tien Nguyen, truyền thuyết (con rồng, cháu tiên), 2026 (still). 3 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Through archival and diaristic methodologies, these intimate films reflect on memories of addiction, displacement, heartbreak, and loss; the struggle to sustain identities and communities over time.
Tien Nguyen, truyền thuyết (con rồng, cháu tiên), 2026, 3’
Jard Lerebours, LESPRI, 2024, 5’
María José Maldonado, AIDS Couldn't Take Our Memories of You, 2025, 15’
Erica Schreiner, Providence, 2026, 7’
Katie Heiserman & Elana Meyers, Survival Without Rent, 2025, 21’
Please join us from 6:30pm for complimentary beverages and to view our current exhibition. The screening will begin at 7pm and finish around 8pm, followed by a discussion and Q&A with artists in attendance. This program is part of our ongoing Sight/Geist series in support of local emerging film and performance artists, organized by Charles de Agustin. Some themes may not be suitable for younger audiences.
All of our events are free and open to the public with RSVPs requested. Info on accessing our space can be found here. Email us with any questions.
About the artists
Tien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American experimental filmmaker from the Bay Area, California. She currently resides in NYC, where they primarily make experimental and/or ethnographic documentary work. Her focus is in exploring through through an enmeshment of both analog and digital experimentation the emotionality of body, history, and precolonial spiritualities in the modern age.
Jard Lerebours (He/They) is a NY based Queer-Black magician in the tradition of Djibril Diop Mambéty. His practice straddles the worlds of creative nonfiction, cinema and video art. Jard approaches filmmaking as a conversation between friends and family guided by their communal West Indian upbringing. He is an active member of the Meerkat Media Artist Collective, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and Millennium Film Workshop’s Programming Committee. Jard’s film work includes the Babylon Red Trilogy which consists of the short films Pandrog, Coconut and Zion. The trilogy explores gender, masculinity, Rastafarianism, Buddhism and notions of home. His films have been showcased internationally by Atlanta Film Festival, New York African Film Festival, Third Horizon, Film Diary NYC, Indie Memphis Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival and Out on Film. Jard's written work has been published by several media outlets including Office Magazine, Forgotten Lands, Crater Magazine, 032C and AFM. They have held residencies at ACRE, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Pollinator.
María José Maldonado is a Salvadorian-Ecuadorian filmmaker and writer from Queens, NY. Her work affirms transness as a vital part of family legacy. She’s a full-time mami-artist raising a beautiful toddler. Her late aunt and babysitter Bianca “Exotica” Maldonado is her muse. Her docushort My Fierce Aunt Bianca has screened at Inside Out, New York Latino Film Festival, San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, among others, and has exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts at Governor's Island. In 2025, María José received grants from Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival and New York State Council on the Arts, $10,000 each, for her docushort AIDS Couldn’t Take Our Memories Of You. Last year, they participated in Third World Newsreel’s 2025 Production Workshop and En Foco’s Artist Fellowship, where they completed their heartfelt, campy docu-narrative film Her Dying Wish. Notably in August 2025, she had her first solo exhibition My Fierce Aunt Bianca with FEMME Art Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, tracing her late transgender aunt’s life and legacy through film, archival fragments, and acts of remembrance. She's a proud alum of Queer|Art Mentorship, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellowship, BRIC Documentary Intensive, Toronto Queer Film Festival DIY Film Lab, and Visual AIDS’s Research Fellowship. Currently, she’s working on her debut feature documentary Loving Bianca. saymariajose.com
Erica Schreiner is a New York City based experimental video and performance artist known for her ethereal, feminist work, filmed on VHS. Performing before the camera, she constructs intimate, surreal worlds that tell her personal stories through allegory, ritual, and sensuality. Her visual language, constructed from symbols like butterflies, fruit, eggs, and flowers, explore transformation, healing from trauma, the divine, a return to nature, and the search for love within a patriarchal, tech-induced world.
Katie Heiserman is a filmmaker and public historian passionate about preserving and publicizing overlooked histories. In her media-making practice, she uses archival material to examine collective memory and urban histories of resistance. Elana Meyers is a documentary filmmaker/editor from New York City drawn to political stories that are overlooked by mainstream media. Her work spotlights personal narratives to convey how societal structures intersect with human experience. Together, they co-directed Survival Without Rent (2025), which was supported by Chicken & Egg Films, American Documentary, New York State Council on the Arts, and Untitled Filmmakers Org. It premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in competition and was awarded Best Short Documentary at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. It will have its New York premiere at DOC NYC and international premiere at Ji.Hlava this fall. The film was also showcased in a work-in-progress program at the Camden International Film Festival. As a co-directing team, they are currently BRIClab Film + TV Residents, where they are developing their next project. Elana has also edited the feature No One Asked You, which premiered at DOC NYC, and served as an editor on the PBS/Amazon Prime series Citizen Nation, which was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy for Best Editing. Katie has worked as an archival producer on several films and podcasts, including the Spotify podcast Sound Barrier: Sylvester and the upcoming PBS documentary West Side Familia. katieheiserman.com elanacmeyersfilm.com
Image description: An experimental film still featuring a solarized image of a person bent over in a chair. On top, small text is written in Vietnamese and English: “i have failed at a duty i did not know was mine”