Ian Soroka (1987, New York City) is a filmmaker and artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work weaves between landscape, embedded histories, memory politics and social relations to nature. Combining diaristic forms of the avant-garde with a commitment to the documentary, his work reveals landscape as a site of contemporary political struggle—as a social space under constant reconfiguration, erasure and re-inscription.

Soroka studied cinema and philosophy at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Prague at FAMU, and earned an M.S. in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT School of Architecture and Planning. His recent film GREETINGS FROM FREE FORESTS (Lep pozdrav iz svobodnih gozdov) was awarded the Grand Prix of the International Competition at its premiere at Doclisboa in 2018. Ian is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Princess Grace Foundation award recipient, and a Fulbright Fellow to Slovenia, where he was a guest researcher at the Slovenian National Film Archive and Cinematheque. His work has been awarded internationally and has screened in festival, gallery and museum contexts including: Art of The Real at Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Doc’s Kingdom Film Seminar, Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Berlin, Madrid), Dokufest Kosovo, DOXA Vancouver, Beldocs Belgrade, Open City London, DokFest Munich, and Kinoteka Ljubljana.

At AiR 351, Soroka will develop and research a new film work, a dialogue between California and Portugal of ongoing lived climate change. The film’s object will be the movement of invasive and highly flammable weeds, which are native to Portugal, and are permanently altering the fire ecology of California. The film will deal with themes around globalization, ‘invasivity’, the management of nature and landscapes in flux.