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The 2022 Symbiosis Competition
Our yearly short film Symbiosis competition, presented by Science Sandbox, is happening once again at the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival.

Symbiosis will bring together scientists and filmmakers to create a science-inspired short film themed SCIENCE NEW WAVE over the course of one week.
The Symbiosis Pairs have been announced. The competition begins!

Our yearly short film Symbiosis competition, presented by Science Sandbox, will take place over the course of the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival (Oct 14-21).

Symbiosis will bring together scientists and filmmakers to create a science-inspired short film themed SCIENCE NEW WAVE over the course of one week.

Key Dates

Symbiosis Competition


THEME: SCIENCE NEW WAVE

Presented by Science Sandbox
October 13 @ 7:00PM
Pre-festival Symbiosis Mixer
GMT Tavern (West Village, Manhattan)

October 17 @ 7:00PM
Symbiosis Lab Meeting / ISFF15 Day 4
Caveat (Lower East Side, Manhattan) - RSVP

October 21 @ 7:00PM
Symbiosis Screening & Festival Closing Night
Wythe Hotel (Lower East Side, Manhattan) - RSVP
Meet the Symbiosis 2022 Participants!
Scientists
  • Beatrice Steinert
    Beatrice is a developmental biologist and historian whose work explores how organismic form has been imaged and imagined in biology, art, and architecture from the 19th century to the present. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and PhD candidate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and History of Science at Harvard University.
  • Kaze Wong
    Kaze is postdoc research at the Flatiron Institute, studying black holes and gravitational waves. Outside his job, he loves making animations and high jumping.
  • Jordan Lei
    Jordan is a PhD student in neuroscience at New York University. He loves figuring out what makes things tick, particularly when it comes to understanding human intelligence and the brain. He's especially passionate about the intersection of neuroscience and deep learning. Before the singularity, you'll find him painting, swimming, playing the guitar, or snuggling up with a good book.
  • Niccolò Bigagli
    Born and raised in Florence, Italy, Niccolò is now a graduate student in physics at Columbia University in the Will lab. His work focuses on the study of the fundamental constituents of matter, atoms, and molecules, at the coldest temperatures physically attainable. He aims to gain enough insight into the building blocks of our world to refine our ability to control them and our understanding of quantum mechanics.
  • Alice Yan
    Alice is an ecologist and environmental lawyer. She has worked across the world – including in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Sydney. Alice is currently based in New York, as a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University. Her current research investigates the relationship between brown bears and Pacific salmon.
  • Anthony Chesebro
    Anthony is an MD/PhD student at Stony Brook University working in computational neuroscience with Dr. Mujica-Parodi in the Laboratory for Computational Neurodiagnostics. Outside of research, he is interested in humanistic approaches to science, with a particular focus on the lenses of narrative and performativity.
Filmmakers
  • Asia Khmelova
    Asia is a Ukrainian filmmaker, currently based in New York. She works in both documentary and narrative forms. In 2015, Asia received a National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine award "For Personal Contribution to the Development of the Ukrainian contemporary art in film and television". Her debut feature screenplay COSMONAUT became Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Writing Award recipient, as well as The Black Family Feature Film finalist. While working on the feature development Asia also prepares an art project about the socio-environmental and environmental impacts of the war.
  • Danna Grace Windsor
    Danna is an animation artist based in NYC. Her work visualizes surreal, futuristic, dystopian yet gentle worlds. Her films have been screened around the world in film festivals and museums. She is currently teaching at Pratt, animating at Robinhood and working on her next film.
  • Ramey Newell
    Ramey is a filmmaker and artist based in British Columbia, Canada. Her moving image works have screened at film festivals, galleries, museums and other art spaces throughout the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. She is also a Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.
  • Anthony Banua-Simon
    Anthony is a documentary filmmaker and editor named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2021 "25 New Faces of Independent Film". His debut feature documentary, Cane Fire, was an official selection of the 2020 Hot Docs International Film Festival as well as the 2021 MoMA Doc Fortnight and won "Best Documentary Feature" at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the 2021 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.
  • Maria Fernandez Pello
    Maria is a Ph.D. student of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work often involves experiments with film, photography, and mixed media. Maria's research interests include body/world relationships in late-industrialism, ecological uncertainty, emergent multispecies assemblages, the senses, and elemental ethnography.
  • Advik Beni
    Advik is a South African artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Through magical realism and non-hierarchical, hybrid modes of filmmaking, he collectively creates spaces for peoples on the fringes to express grief and trauma. He is currently developing a feature-length experimental documentary based in Cato-Manor, Durban.
The Symbiosis 2022 Jury
  • Animator, Biologist
    Sophia is a research biologist and sometimes also an animator and science filmmaker. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU, studying the genetics that contribute to the differences in radiation response among animals. As a filmmaker Sophia has created animated videos in many settings, including a pop-science series, educational workshops, college-level classroom materials, scientific grant applications, and documentary film.
  • Filmmaker, Sound Designer
    Yashaswini Raghunandan works with both film and sound. She completed her Masters from the Royal College of Art, London, with the support of the INLAKS scholarship in 2015. She was with the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and a recipient of the Peoples' archive of Rural India Fellowship in 2018. She is working on an installation titled 'The Hidden Story' with neuroscientist Arianna Zuanazzi. She is also making a film about translating Atmanam's Tamil poems into Kannada and English with her father.

    Symbiosis 2021 winner: "I invite you"
  • Neuroscientist
    Arianna is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. She investigates how the brain makes sense of language and music using neuroimaging techniques such as Magnetoencephalography. She is also involved in several initiatives that aim to make science accessible to the general public and to use science to create positive social change.

    Symbiosis 2021 winner: "I invite you"
Films are created over the course of our festival, October 14-21.
HOW IT WORKS

On opening night, October 14th, 6 filmmakers and 6 scientists will be paired up and sent off into the city to begin filmmaking with a $2,500 stipend in hand.

The pairs will meet on Monday, October 17th at Caveat for our Symbiosis Lab Meeting and speak about their art/science works-in-progress. The audience will provide feedback, and all final films will be screened on our Closing Night, October 21, when a winner will be selected!

The theme of this year's Symbiosis Competition is SCIENCE NEW WAVE.

The Science New Wave is characterized by its rejection of traditional scientific film conventions and stereotypes in favor of experimentation and personal expression.
Learn more at sciencenewwave.com

    SYMBIOSIS is supported by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation dedicated to inspiring a deeper interest in science, especially among those who have been historically underrepresented in science engagement efforts. We collaborate with programs that support science in culture.

    Symbiosis animation from our friends at Rooftop Animation below!
    Made on
    Tilda