Dr Andrea Zimmerman

Biography

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multilayered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.

Andrea has directed five feature length films: Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, written and voiced by the late John Berger), Estate, a Reverie (2015), Erase and Forget (2017), Artangel produced Here for Life (2019) and The Wapping Project produced Wayfaring Stranger (2024), all of which have screened widely, including at Locarno, IDFA, Istanbul, Berlinale, BAFICI and IFFR festivals, as well as in cinemas, galleries, and community spaces.

Selected exhibitions include 'Shelter in Place', Estuary 2021, 'Civil Rites', the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, 'Common Ground' at Spike Island, Bristol and 'Real Estates' at Peer Gallery.

Selected writing includes extended essays in 'Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter', 'Open Democracy', 'La Furia Umana', ‘Another Gaze’, among others.) and co-editing the books 'Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain' (Myrdle Court Press) and 'Doorways: Women, Homelessness Trauma and Resistance' (House Sparrow Press).

Their films are held in the Arts Council England Collection, Archives and libraries, and are distributed by LUX, Modern Films, Grasshopper Films, Second Run DVD.

They co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary 'The Look of Silence').

They grew up on a council estate and left school at 16 due to not fitting into mainstream education.

Andrea's research interests include:
Co-existence (including more-than-human subjectivities), filmmaking as engaged social and political practice, participatory re-enactment, military/spectacular relations, imaginative hybridity and narrative de-framing in documentary practice, forms of reverie, class and culture, social and environmental justice, place and senses of belonging.

She / They