ABOUT
Maria Niro is a New York City-based artist and award-winning filmmaker whose work has been broadcasted on television and screened in theatres, festivals, and museums worldwide. She is a member of New Day Films, a filmmaker-run distribution company providing social issue documentaries to educators since 1971. Niro's work crosses several disciplines: film, video, photography, and sound. Her moving image work includes long-form documentaries and experimental short films.
Niro's films touch upon various social issues such as war and trauma in The Art of Un-War (2022); voyeurism, surveillance, and the camera in Station to Station (2020); political tension In An Alien Land (2018); war, technological innovation, and mass destruction in Glitch Telemetry (2011); the voiceless disenfranchised in Amerika Reflect (2010); and collective consumption in Torso (2011), among others. Her video art films weave together found sound, images, and poems to create a collage of aural and visual prose. To date, she's completed one feature-length documentary and over forty short films with original sound she's created, including video art films for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts website. Niro's documentary The Art of Un-War which follows the renowned avant garde-artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been broadcasted on TV Ontario (TVO) and has screened in theatres, museums, and universities, worldwide including New York Jewish Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Festival, Artecinema in Teatro San Carlo Naples Italy, the National Gallery of Art DC, Harvard Art Museums, Walter Reade Theatre Film at Lincoln Center, MIT ACT, and CUNY Graduate Center, among others. The film won "Best Feature Documentary" at the New Jersey International Film Festival Documentary (2022) and received a "Special Mention" Jury Prize at Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival Festival (2022). Her short films have screened at festivals throughout the world and in galleries, museums and universities including the Whitechapel Gallery in the UK, Microscope Gallery in NYC, Queens Museum NYC, Harvard Art Museums, Anthology Film Archives NYC, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Exit Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, MIT, CUNY, and Cornell University, among others. Niro's work has been recognized and supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Polish Cultural Institute NY, the Puffin Foundation, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul S Korea, among others. Niro studied Film and Media Studies at The New School for Social Research. She has served on the Board of Directors at The New American Cinema Group / The Filmmakers' Cooperative in New York City. She proudly serves on the advisory board of More Art, a nonprofit organization that supports collaborations between professional artists and communities to create public art and educational programs that inspire social justice.
"I found myself within a forest dark but the straightforward path had been lost"
from the film "Sleeping Woman" featuring words from Dante Inferno Canto 1 - Watch Excerpt
Films
NEWS
The Art of Un-War screens at Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue New York, NY October 20th at 7PM
Krzysztof Wodiczko and Maria Niro in person for post screening discussion. Tickets