Miranda Pennell is a London-based artist-filmmaker whose work often uses images from British state archives to reflect on the relationship between past, present and future.  Her films emphasise the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents, most recently drawing on genre-fiction as a way of engaging with troubled histories.

Her award-winning films have been screened internationally in cinemas, galleries and on broadcast TV.  Her recent work has screened at major international film festivals that include London, Rotterdam, Berlin, New York, and Vienna.

After training as a dancer in the 1980s Miranda Pennell’s practice shifted from dance and live choreography to film direction, where she went on to create numerous films based around performance and choreography in everyday life.  In 2010 she enrolled at Goldsmiths College to study for an MA in Visual Anthropology, after which she undertook her PhD at the Centre for Research in Education in Arts and Media at University of Westminster. She received her PhD in 2016 for her feature-length film The Host’ and her thesis Film as an Archive for Colonial Photographs: Activating the Past in the Present. The Host, based on the visual archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, subsequently toured the UK with the Independent Cinema Office. 

Selected  screenings include one-person programmes  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), Photofilm: Sampling the Archive, Institut Français, Budapest (2017), Choreocinema: Siobhan Davies & Miranda Pennell, Barbican, London (2017), Irish Film Institute, Dublin (2016),  retrospectives at Glasgow Short Film Festival (2011), Vienna International Shorts (2011),  Tampere Short Film Festival (2009) Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2006).

Group  exhibitions include 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).

Miranda leads the Politics and Poetics of Archival Filmmaking course for UCL ‘s Open City Documentary Festival. In 2022-3 she is artist in residence at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, London.