Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

A dreamy fragment about the end of the world. A black girl wanders into a Hollywood western and mourns for the dead.

In this thought-provoking documentary, filmmaker Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich delves into the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis's monumental sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra (1876).

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work.

A short film and a spell of protection.

This sonic wonder, which premiered as part of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, documents Leigh’s practice as a sculptor and her evocation of the endurance of Black womanhood by way of spirit and tradition. As scholar Yasmina Price puts it, the film is “an incantation of multiple architectures of the self for black women.”

The film explores the history of the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women in the 1840s, during the height of the Underground Railroad (a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada).

A dreamy fragment about the end of the world. A black girl wanders into a Hollywood western and mourns for the dead.

In this thought-provoking documentary, filmmaker Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich delves into the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis's monumental sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra (1876).

In this thought-provoking documentary, filmmaker Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich delves into the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis's monumental sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra (1876).

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work.

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work.

A short film and a spell of protection.

This sonic wonder, which premiered as part of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, documents Leigh’s practice as a sculptor and her evocation of the endurance of Black womanhood by way of spirit and tradition. As scholar Yasmina Price puts it, the film is “an incantation of multiple architectures of the self for black women.”

The film explores the history of the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women in the 1840s, during the height of the Underground Railroad (a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada).

"A Quality of Light" reaches into the filmmaker's familial lineage of black women artists. This film examines the under-told story of the haunted artist who also inhabits the unique political position of being black and a woman. The film applies principles of music theory and West African performance structure in their construction.

Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.

Premiered at Cucalorus Film Festival

Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts. Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century.

Through a collaborative writing process with filmmakers, three women bring to life “The Command Center to Bring Women Home,” an imagined space run by formerly incarcerated women for those with nowhere else to turn but to each other, a place where mothers can reunite and heal with their children, and women are able to hold and comfort one another.