Ryan Powell | Festival Director
Ryan is a mixed media artist, filmmaker and curator. His work takes various approaches in exploring the politics of space and the histories that shape the landscapes we inhabit. He worked for several years on the Community and Education team at Picturehouse Cinemas where he programmed accessible strands of screenings and worked with community groups, charities and schools on organising film programs. He is passionate about bringing durational film to new audiences.
Catherine Elwes | Programmer
Elwes is a video artist and curator. She was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About Time at the ICA in 1980 and was the director of the biennial UK/Canadian Film & Video Exchange (1998-2006) and co-curator of Figuring Landscapes (2008-2010), an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape. Elwes is the author of Landscape and the Moving Image and recently curated the online exhibition Landscape and the Moving Image at LUX.
Edward Smyth | Programmer
Edward Smyth is a filmmaker, curious to explore the most beautiful and peculiar things in life. His films have screened at major London venues, including BFI Southbank, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA & Curzon Soho; with six selected for the BAFTA-recognised London Short Film Festival.
He has selected films for the Slow Film Festival since 2020, with a curiosity for formally innovative, playful work. He is always curious to explore and raise awareness of obscure and forgotten work, that challenges longstanding canons of film history.
Andrew Key | Programmer
Andrew Key is a novelist and film critic, whose writing on cinema has appeared widely online and in print, in publications including The New York Times Magazine, LA Review of Books, The Point, Vittles and Parapraxis. For four years he wrote a Substack about the place of film criticism in the critique of everyday life, Roland Barfs Film Diary. His novel, Ross Hall, was published by Grand Iota Press in 2022. He lives in Sheffield.
Kat Haylett | Junior Programmer
Kat is a writer and film programmer. She is currently completing her MA in Film Programming and Curation, with a focus on the relationship between filmgoers and their environment, in particular how being physically present in a theatrical exhibition space impacts the audience experience of documentary, essay, and durational film. Her writing has appeared in AnOther Magazine and she has curated programmes for the Korean Cultural Centre, Genesis Cinema, and Bloomsbury Festival.
Helen de Witt | Trustee
Helen de Witt is a curator and lecturer specialising in artists’ film and independent cinema. Previously Head of Cinemas at the BFI and programmer of the BFI London Film Festival’s Experimenta section of artists’ film, she has curated programmes for the BFI Southbank, Barbican, ICA, Tate, and several international film festivals. Helen is a lecturer at UCL and at Birkbeck and a visiting lecturer at NFTS. She has published in film magazines and websites including Sight & Sound, BFI online, Animate Projects, Club Des Femmes and the Journal of Film Preservation, and contributed to a number of books on artists’ film. She has served on the boards of LUX and Four Corners Film and Photography.
Emily Richardson | Trustee
Emily Richardson is an artist filmmaker who makes films about the trace of human presence and our changing relationship with environment and landscape. She is a film lecturer and runs a monthly artists film screening event at The Art Station, Suffolk. Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.
Peter Treherne | Trustee
Peter Treherne was a co-founder of the Slow Film Festival, and directed the organisation through its first editions. He is also a moving image artist who explores the effects of weather and the environment on agriculture and creative labour. His artwork has been exhibited at galleries and festivals including the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin and Festival ECRA, has been funded by the Arts Council of England, and is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Kinoscope. He is currently working on a co-creative project, Matter of Britain, with the community of Mayfield, East Sussex, where the Slow Film Festival was founded.
