Michelle Williams Gamaker

Michelle Williams Gamaker, is a London based artist filmmaker. Through an interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she proposes critical alternatives to colonial and imperialist storytelling in early 20th-century British and Hollywood studio films. Leaning into the magic of cinema, Williams Gamaker explores cinema history by using the tools of cinema against itself to sabotage the casting process and recasts characters as fictional activists.

Since 2014, Williams Gamaker has been developing Fictional Activism, including her Dissolution Trilogy (2017-19) and The Bang Straws (2021), which received special commendation by the Jury of the 65th BFI London Film Festival and won Best Experimental Short for the Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF) 2021.

Williams Gamaker’s 2022 Film London Production Award enabled her first film in Fictional Revenge: Thieves (2023) which premiered at her solo exhibition Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at South London Gallery, touring to Dundee Contemporary Arts and Bluecoat, Liverpool (2023-24). Thieves also won ASFF’s Best Experimental Film in 2023. Her recent film Oberon (2023), commissioned by  BFI for the Powell and Pressburger will be followed by Strange Evidence (2025) which will complete Williams Gamaker’s Critical Affection trilogy.

Williams Gamaker’s work has featured in BFI FLARE LGBTQ+ Film Festival (2017) and BFI’s LFF Experimenta programme (2018, 2021), while her Dissolution trilogy (2017-2019), comprising House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018) and The Eternal Return (2019) contributed to her jointly winning Film London’s Jarman Award in 2020. Her work is in the Arts Council Collection,and her entire filmography will also be part of the British Film Institute’s National Collection in 2024.

Williams Gamaker is developing her first feature, Majestic City with screenwriter Elan Gamaker and Producers Samm Haillay and Sophie Mathisen. She is a Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths University and is also a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2022-2025).