Miranda Pennell is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose films often rework images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations.  Her work emphasises the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents.

Her award-winning films have screened at New York Film Festival, Berlinale, FID Marseille, Viennale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Open City Documentary Festival, among others.  

Miranda has an MA in Visual Anthropology  from Goldsmiths College, London. Her PhD from the Centre for Research in Education in Arts and Media at University of Westminster resulted in the feature-length film The Host and her thesis Film as an Archive for Colonial Photographs: Activating the Past in the Present. 

Selected  screenings include one-person programmes ‘Returning the Gaze’ at Documenta Madrid (2025), ‘ Strange Objects (2023) at Close-Up Film Centre, London, retrospectives at Stuttgart FilmWinter Festival for Expanded Media (2019), Choreography and Archives for UnderDox at  the Filmmuseum Munich (2017),  retrospectives at Glasgow Short Film Festival (2011), Vienna International Shorts (2011),  Tampere Short Film Festival (2009) Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2006).

Group exhibitions include at the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2026) Evil Eye: the parallel histories of ballistics and optics (2023) at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture , San Sebastian;  Intersectional Geographies (2022) Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, Tanzbilder, New Museum for Art and Design, Nuremberg (2019), Lahore Biennale 02 (2018), All Systems Go, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2016),  Europe – The Future of History, Kunsthaus Zurich (2015), and The World Turned Upside Down,  Mead Gallery (2013).

She leads the biannual Politics and Poetics of Archival Filmmaking course for UCL’s Open City Documentary Festival.