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  Her work emphasises the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents.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 as part of New York Film Festival ‘Currents’, Berlinale, FID Marseille, Viennale, IDFA, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, 25 FPS International Experimental Film Festival Zagreb and Open City Documentary Festival, among others.  

Selected one-person programmes include ‘H is for History N is for Now’ at Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival and Solar Cine-Gallery (Pt) (forthcoming, 2026),  ‘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 Eye/s Open – New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage at the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2026) Evil Eye: the parallel histories of ballistics and optics (2023) at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture , San Sebastian;  Tanzbilder, New Museum for Art and Design, Nuremberg (2019); All Systems Go, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2016),  Europe – The Future of History, Kunsthaus Zurich (2015).

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. 

She currently leads the triannual Politics and Poetics of Archival Filmmaking course for UCL Public Anthropology and Open City Documentary Festival.