ABOUT

Lior Shamriz is a film director, interdisciplinary artist, and musician based in Oakland, California. Through their cinema, multi-screens installation, music and participatory performance, they explore and question ideas about society, being and the body. In their fiction films, Shamriz often stages drama-comedies that challenge reductive narratives about immigration, nationality, and sexuality. Many examine individual and collective histories related, but not limited, to the MENA region and its diasporas. Staging essayistic narrations that explore cinema as performance, their work utilizes filmic languages as a process of reflexive documentation of the world while staging interventions in it.

Shamriz’s oeuvre includes feature-length independent/experimental narrative films, many short experimental fiction films, and essay and documentary films. Their work was featured at the Berlinale (2010,13,15), Locarno IFF, Sarajevo IFF, MoMA’s New Directors / New Films, BAFICI, Frameline, MixNYC, Torino IFF, Outfest Los Angeles, and exhibited at KW Berlin, MMCA Korea, NGV Australia, among many other venues and festivals. They won awards at Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage (2013,14,15), and received retrospectives by the Thessaloniki International Festival (2012), Ars Independent Katowice (2012), SteakCinema Seoul (2021), and the Berlin Art Film Festival (2015) among others. In addition to film essays, short documentaries and narrative films, Shamriz created dozens of poetry video commissions. Some were commissioned directly by the poets while others were commissioned by the Griffin Poetry Prize in Toronto. They include readings by poets such as Ocean Vuong, Douglas Kearney, Yusuf Komunyaaka, Heather McHugh, Dez’mon Omega Fair, Liz Howard, Valzhyna Mort, Victoria Chang, and Ida Limón.

From 2015-17, Shamriz curated film, performances and residencies at PAM performance space in Highland Park, Los Angeles, and from 2018 for Project Space Festival Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. In 2023 they launched the magazine Mimesis – for Film as Performance. Their writing appeared in the Journal for New Zealand & Pacific Studies, MoMA’s Dirty Looks reader, Pacific Arts Journal, and Mimesis Magazine. Shamriz is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.