A Madden is a filmmaker, educator, and facilitator and has worked as an editor and director of documentary, narrative, and commercial projects for 15 years. Their work has been exhibited internationally and won multiple awards and nominations including screenings at SXSW, DOCNYC, and NewFilmmakers Los Angeles. Projects include directing the short documentaries, A Spell For Queer Home and Dear Elsa: 10 Letters + 10 Experiments, the TV pilot, Mercy Mistress, the short narrative films, Separation Celebration and Names of Women, being a primary editor on the feature hybrid documentary, Roleplay, and editing for clients including Sundance, MTV, BET, Pride Media, Refinery 29, Condé Nast, and NBC Universal. As an educator and facilitator, they have taught filmmaking at Utah Valley University, Reel Works, Hunter College, and Spy Hop Productions, managed the artist support program, Artist Foundry at the Utah Film Center, and created Reflection Collective, an independent educational and coaching project that focuses on creative practice as an opportunity for exploration, introspection, and connection. They hold a BA in Film from Montana State University and an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from Hunter College.
As an editor, I am highly organized, technically skilled, boldly creative, and ethically dedicated.
As a director, I am a rigorous steward of vision, an attentive and compassionate leader, and a facilitator of emergent processes for storytelling and collaboration.
As an educator and facilitator, my vision is to create space and impetus for other artists to engage in thoughtful, intentional, and creative risk-taking and reflection with a lens toward challenging the ways oppressive systems manifest and collectively using art to imagine and catalyze new futures.
My artistic approach explores evolutions of intimacy, identity, body, and connection by utilizing practices of performance, embodiment, multiplicity, experimentation, and magic in the processes, stories, and experiences I choose to steward. I seek to create work that provides questions rather than answers, points of connection rather than completed paths, and exists in the cracks between art and life, subject and collaborator, narrative and performance, and the community and materials with which they are made. I am interested in using image and sound as material to shift time and memory, seek the unknown, gently disrupt consciousness, and in doing so, create space for new possibilities of being and connecting. Everything I create seeks to queer both the process and the content. I am rooted in my belief that video is a portal for breaking binaries, creating embodied experience, and a way to see and be seen. My films, projects, workshops, offerings, and spaces are reflections, openings, and spells, ways to see ourselves, question, and imagine, to hold nuance, complexity, and fluidity, to be in community.