Vanessa Woods’ 16 mm films encompass documentary, diaristic, and fictive universes that push the boundaries of the narrative form. As a photographer and 16mm filmmaker, she is interested in the crossover between static and dynamic images, and in exploring how both can be conjoined to tell and retell stories. Many of her films use her black and white photographs as source material, wherein the photographic document is relied on partly as an object of truth, and partly as an infinitely malleable image-base. The flux between the still and moving image allows narratives to continually develop and shift and provides a means for examining conceptual relationships between photography, time, image and memory.

Vanessa Woods graduated with an MFA in film, with honors, from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Film Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Woods has produced eight films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including the Education Channel, the Centre International d'Art (France), The Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany) and San Francisco International Film Festival.