At the core of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s vibrant and vital body of work over the last decade is a continual drive to center the often-overlooked lives of Black women. Negotiating a line between visibility and opacity, Hunt-Ehrlich’s films balance historical research with poetic form. Through layered and fragmented storytelling, her subjects, who range from artists to groups organizing during the Underground Railroad, serve not just as reflections upon history, but also as lenses through which to understand the present.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s cinema residency at the Walker is inspired by her first feature film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Described by the artist as a “post-biopic,” the film mirrors the surrealist and decolonial thinking of its titular subject, a writer and anti-colonial activist from Martinique who was a key figure in the 1930s Négritude movement, to make a deconstructed biography.

Building on this, the artist will use her cinema residency to further think through questions on Black women and desire that emanate from her film. The series will also present two screenings in the cinema as historical touchpoints: Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, starring opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, and Stig Björkman’s Georgia, Georgia, written by Maya Angelou. A third component of her residency will manifest in the Walker Reader, a published roundtable conversation between Hunt-Ehrlich and artist Simone Leigh on dreams and the subconscious in the lives of Black women.