Joanna Byrne is an artist-filmmaker working with material, collaborative and sustainable filmmaking practices. She works in a tactile way, blending analogue and digital processes. Her films, performances and installations incorporate eco-feminist themes, draw on queer experiences of being ‘in-between’, and explore human / non-human entanglements within urban green spaces. In her socially-engaged work she uses filmmaking as a tool to connect with individuals, communities and the environment, sharing experiences and co-creating stories. Her work has been screened in the UK and internationally in gallery, cinema and non-traditional contexts.
current work - past lives
commissioned by yorkshire contemporary for bradford UK city of culture 2025
longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2026
“For Practice Bradford, Byrne created Past Lives, her first immersive multi-medium environment that invites us to reflect on the past, present and future lives of urban spaces. The installation traces her investigation into a partially derelict site in Shipley - once home to The Branch Hotel and a cinema known by many names (from Princes Hall to Shipley Flicks).
The non-linear expanded cinema environment includes an immersive soundscape created from field recordings and creative audio experiments, and images made with analogue materials (35mm slides, super 8mm and 16mm film), hand-developed and printed with plants collected from the location: stinging nettles, wild grasses, valerian, marsh thistle and hedge mustard.
The looped still and moving images explore different elements within and surrounding this accidentally rewilded site. By playing with size and scale, Byrne disrupts our perceptions of urban spaces. The soundscape conveys the site’s past lives alongside its present, evoking memories and experiences embedded in the landscape. Past Lives creates a dreamlike encounter caught between the human and the non-human, geography and history, the internal and the external, memory and reality.”
Interpretation text by Yorkshire Contemporary, 2025.
EXHIBITION:
UPCOMING:
EXPERIMENTAL LOOP, 7 November - 6 December, NYLAAT, New York.
2026:
Soft Light, 3 October 2026-3 January 2027, Sunny Bank Mills, Leeds.
Longlisted for and featured in: Aesthetica Art Prize, 17 July – 15 November, York Art Gallery, York.
2025:
Practice:Bradford, 18 September-19 October, Loading Bay, Duke Street, Bradford
PRESS:
Upcoming in 2026: Featured in: Analog Cookbook Issue 10: Resistance
2025:
Corridor8: FEATURE: OUR TURN: The Art of Becoming
The Fourdrinier: FEATURE: Turner Prize & Practice Bradford
TSOTA: OUR TURN: Practice Bradford Showcases New Artists – Review
Yorkshire Contemporary: OUR TURN: Practice Bradford
Joanna Byrne: Past Lives - Feature on On8Mil
TECTUM ARGENTI, 2022, 9 MINS, 16MM FILM: DIGITISED
Commissioned by Loose Screw Film Festival, 2022. A moving meditation on reconnecting with the self in nature: shot, hand-processed and edited on 16mm film. Internal and external landscapes intertwine in an assemblage of fractured but interconnected poetic gestures, multiple exposures, textural images, and abstract marks made onto the surface of the film, evoking a difficult (but at times euphoric) journey of coming out and healing from the past.
Selected Screenings and Exhibitions: On Queerness and Ecology, London; Gravitational Lensing, Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland CA; New York Filmmakers Coop, NYC; CROSSROADS, San Francisco; 25FPS, Zagreb, Croatia; Kinoskop, Belgrade, Serbia; Braziers International Film Festival, UK; Illumination, Centre Space Gallery, Bristol; Strangloscope, Itajai, Brazil; SeaChange Film Festival, Isle of Tiree, UK.
Since 2024, distributed by the New York Filmmakers Coop.
UNTITLED (SE139159), 2023, analogue film collage & artist’s film, 6 MINS, 16MM & 35MM FILM: DIGITISED
Awarded 3rd prize, SCAF Emerging Artist Award 2023
Analogue film collage and artist’s animation (1,149 scanned and animated frames) created using cyanotypes and phytography, in collaboration with wild plants and grasses from the park near my home. Both techniques create unique, painterly images which move between figuration and abstraction. The soundtrack is formed of field recordings from the site where the plants were foraged.
Exhibition: Scott Creative Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award 2023, Thirsk, North Yorks (July-August 2023); Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield (October 2023-January 2024).
MEETING HALFWAY, 2022, 5 MINS, 16MM FILM: DIGITISED
Collaborative double channel 16mm film with Lucy Bergman shot on location in Warwick - the halfway point between the two filmmakers’ birthplaces. Shot on 16mm reversal film, and edited in-camera, this work plays with idea of meeting in the middle, and dabbling there for a while (Sound by Gatestudio.Eu/Andrea Leoni, Italy).
Screenings in 2023: Flatpack Festival, Birmingham; Braziers International Film Festival, Braziers Park (UK); SeaChange Film Festival, Isle of Tiree (UK)
blue moon (2023) 3 mins, cyanotypes on recycled 16mm filmstock made with foraged wild plants, grasses and Northern sunlight.
A camera-less 16mm film inspired by the Blue Supermoon at Saltburn-by-the-Sea on 30 August 2023. Working in collaboration with foraged local grasses and wild plants, I contact printed the organic material directly onto the surface of recycled 16mm filmstrips coated with hand-made cyanotype chemistry.
Exhibition in 2024:
On Queerness + Ecology, London, 27-30 September [group exhibition]
‘Repetition: PC24, PHOTO-CANOPY, Burton on Trent, July [group exhibition]
Animating Hexham, Hexham, 9-11 February [group exhibition]
RUSHES (2023) 16MM FILM: DIGITISED
Collaborative film made with Lucy Bergman on the Isle of Tiree, Scotland, which explores the idea of ‘rushes’: firstly as living subjects in the film, bending to the continuous, relentless winds coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, and secondly in relation to filmmaking practice: ‘rushes’ as a body of raw material that can be assembled into multiple, perhaps infinite iterations.
Artist’s film celebrating the life and work of Dr. Martin Thomas (1974-2022), researcher in Chinese-English multimodal translation. Shot entirely on celluloid, the film was shaped by Martin’s interests in psychogeography and street photography, and evolved through collaboration and conversations with his friends and colleagues at the University of Leeds.
The soundtrack centres people's experiences of Martin, via field recordings made during group 'derives' or drifts through places and spaces that held shared meanings and memories. Animated sequences were created through darkroom experimentation with Martin's physical archive of East Asian toothpaste packaging and his handwritten Chinese vocabulary books, contact printed onto 16mm film.
Mirroring the non-linear, fragmentary experience of grieving, the film attempts to embody the emotional textures of memory. Sound and image often drift apart, with presence felt through absence. Animals encountered while walking in Martin’s footsteps guide us on our journey, as we explore the porous boundaries between the past and the present; between this life and what comes after.
Martin is evoked in glimpses: in reminiscences of friends; sentimental objects; his notebooks read aloud; the tactile imprints of his handwriting. The film is a poetic (and often humorous) act of remembrance: multisensory, collaborative, and deeply alive.
Commissioned by the the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds.
other RECENT projects
DIANE (WRAPPED IN PLASTIC), 2011/2021, 4 MINS, SUPER 8 FILM: DIGITISED
A collaboration with Mark Byrne. Super 8 hauntology reimagining a series of one-way conversations with the permanently off-camera Diane, made on expired film (best before 1990), home-processed, wrapped in plastic and buried in the woods. A collaboration between ourselves, the source material, the body of film and earth it was buried in, the collaged soundtrack was recorded directly onto the magnetic strip of the film.
Screenings: Analogica 14, Bologna, Italy; Light Matter Film Festival Touring Programme @ New York Filmmakers Co-op, New York | Museo Nacional del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador | Kino Palais, Buenos Aires | No Name Cinema, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Light Matter Film Festival, Alfred, NY (US) Film and Forage Symposium & Screening, London (UK)
LIVING MURAL, 2017, PARTICIPATORY INSTALLATION WITH ANALOGUE PROJECTIONS
Commissioned by Bedford Creative Arts
Two-day participatory tactile cinema workshop and live performance installation at The Higgins, Bedford (collaboration with Maria Anastassiou).
Participants of all ages worked in a tactile way with collage, shapes, patterns and unusual materials, creating slides and acetates to create a constantly changing assemblage in the gallery space.
UNRAVEL NYC @ WHITNEY MUSEUM of american art, 2016, ARTIST RESIDENCY + 16mm film
Commissioned by Whitney Museum of American Art for Dreamlands: Immersive cinema and art 1905-2016.
The film was hand made using tactile cameraless processes by 500+ people over an eight day residency. A collective audio-visual portrait of its creators, each frame of the film corresponds to one unit of the 18,000-square-foot Neil Bluhm Family Galleries where Dreamlands was installed. The soundtrack is a multilayered collage of interviews with participants, ambient sound and optical sound from the filmstrip itself.
Exhibition in 2016: Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905-2016, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.