Stephen Wardell

Hi, my name is Stephen Wardell. I’m a filmmaker and teaching artist who makes experimental narratives, documentary portraits, and handmade films.

My documentary work chronicles family histories through the construction of collaborative utopian fantasies. And my handmade 16mm films use material interventions to express personal experiences of systems of power.

For the last 8 years, I’ve co-directed a series of collaborative portraits with my six younger siblings. My most recent film in this series, “Katelin Describes a Crisis,” was finished in early 2026, and it is a musical documentary that imagines a world-ending apocalypse.

My current work focuses on alternative experiments with 16mm film in the service of imagining the past and future of queer public spaces. In 2025 I received an Early Development Grant from the LEF Foundation’s Moving Image Fund for my film “Combat Zones,” currently in production. The film uses hand-processing experiments to reanimate fantasies that once populated long-gone public spaces, as a way of exploring the contemporary landscape of queer public space in Boston.

My films have played at festivals worldwide, including Visions du Réel, L’Alternativa Independent Film Fest Barcelona, the Harkat 16mm Film Festival (Mumbai), Kinoscop Festival (Belgrade), Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film & Video Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2020, I won the Emerging Artist Jury Award at the Mimesis Documentary Festival.

I was a participant at the 2026 Film Farm (Independent Imaging Retreat) in Ontario; a Flaherty Seminar Fellow for 2023’s Seminar “Queer World-Mending” in Saratoga Springs; and in 2021 I was a fellow at the Visions du Réel–Industry: Opening Scenes Lab in Nyon, Switzerland.

I received my MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa, and I have previously taught as a part-time lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design and a visiting assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Born and raised in Michigan, currently I live in Western Massachusetts where I work as a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College.