Isabell Spengler is a film- and video artist from Berlin. In her films, video installations and live-film-performances, she analyzes and mediates diverging constructions of reality, imaginary worlds and their representation. Spengler invents new cinematic forms by working across disciplines and in interdisciplinary collaborations. In dialogues with other artists, she examines social, political and media-technological developments, predominant power structures, utopian and dystopian visions of the future.
Her fantastic seeming film scenarios follow a logic, language and time-structure of their own, developed by working with playful self-imposed rules for collaboration, performances for the camera, choreographed camera movements, experimental writing and editing techniques, drawing, photography, costume design and model making.
As director, author and performer, she has worked with artists and choreographers such as Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl and Lindy Annis, composer/performer Neo Hülcker, artist/filmmaker Lucile Desamory and Los Angeles-based sculptor Alice Könitz amongst others. She is a founding member of the feminist art collective Maternal Fantasies (founded 2018).

Since 1998, her works have been presented worldwide in exhibitions, film and media art festivals and in cinemas, including at the Berlinale (Forum Expanded 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012), at MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2020), Ludwig Museum in Budapest (2023) and at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (Videonale.19, 2023). She has received numerous grants and awards for her work. For her installation VOICE ELEVATOR (2021) she received the Bremen Award for Video Art.

Spengler taught film and media art in Germany and in North America at universities and art colleges such as Bard College Berlin, the Southland Institute Los Angeles, University Potsdam & Fachhochschule Potsdam.
From 2004 to 2014 she was as a guest professor and assistant professor for experimental film/media art at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2022, she was a guest professor at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen.

She studied with VALIE EXPORT and Heinz Emigholz in Berlin (Meisterschülerin of Heinz Emigholz 1999) and with James Benning at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles (MFA in Film/Video, 2001).



Portfolio 2024, selected works, PDF