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Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich


Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (USA) is a filmmaker and artist born in New York City in 1987. Her films, concerned with the inner worlds of Black women, are rooted in archival and field research, using abstraction as a mode of resistance in depicting subjects deprived of self-autonomy under the exploitative gaze of the colonial camera. Her films and installations, including A Gentleman’s War (2013), McKayla (2017), Spit on the Broom (2018), Outfox the Grave (2020), Too Bright to See (2023), and many others, have screened at numerous venues internationally, including the Guggenheim Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Venice Biennale (2022), Berlinale, BlackStar Film Festival, Perez Museum, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema in 2020, and is the recipient of a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Film, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her first feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024, with subsequent reviews appearing in The Film Stage, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, and other international journals. Conspiracy (2022), co-directed with artist Simone Leigh for the US Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is a tribute to the manual labours of creation which closes with a gesture of contained Black feminist arson, forming a contact zone between the two artists’ respective practices of sculpture and filmmaking. The film screened at select venues in 2023, including at Doc Fortnight: MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media and as part of Media City Film Festival’s 26th edition. Hunt-Ehrlich lives and works in Brooklyn with her family, where she also teaches as an assistant professor in the Media Studies department at City University of New York. 






Too Bright to See, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, USA, 16mm > digital, 27.5 min, 2023

Too Bright to See draws on Hunt-Ehrlich’s extensive research into 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. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Bretonh however, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.
–Pérez Art Museum Miami

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.



Footnote to the West, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, USA , digital, 5 min, 2020

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

This film is now streaming globally online. Click here to view.


These films are co-presented with Black Gold and Three Fold, Detroit.  

Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy of the artist © Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.



View next: Nour Ouayda, as part of Media City Film Festival 27th Edition: Spotlight Series



Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.