Netherlands Film Festival welcomes new interdisciplinary makers as Fellows 2025-2026

02 July 2025

The Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) announces the third generation of Fellows. Luna Maurer, Nirit Peled, and Matthew C. Wilson will work on their research into new technologies and storytelling.

This new group of Fellows concludes the three-year trajectory of the Digital Culture Fellowship Programme, initiated by the NFF in collaboration with numerous partner organizations. The research programme fosters the professional growth of participants from fields including science, visual arts, film, gaming, design, and other forms of visual culture, encouraging innovation at the intersection of society and technology.

Paulien Dresscher, NFF Digital Culture Programmer:

"Technological developments are moving faster than ever, and their impact on society is enormous. It's fantastic that through the Fellowship Programme we can provide space for makers who conduct artistic research into these developments, raising poetic or pressing questions about the times we live in."

Biographies and Research Proposals

Luna Maurer

Luna Maurer is a mixed media designer and artist, teacher, and author, focusing on the impact of digital technologies on everyday life. She explores human qualities through installations, performances, web experiences, and films, blending digital and physical elements. In 2012, she co-founded Studio Moniker, which shares a similar focus. In 2024, she won the Golden Calf for Best Digital Culture Production for her work Emoticons Don’t Have Wrinkles.

During her Fellowship research, Luna Maurer will explore what happens when she has an AI companion as a dance partner. It’s not a digital twin or virtual dancer, but an AI system that interprets, responds to, and challenges her movements—enabling a mutual dialogue. She investigates whether physical expression can be a way to create new narratives with a non-human entity: What happens when a human dancer and a machine truly engage in "conversation" through movement?

Nirit Peled

Nirit Peled is a multidisciplinary artist and independent filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of narrative, power, and technology across media. Educated as an artist at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (VAV-moving image) and as a designer at the Sandberg Institute, her practice moves fluidly between visual art, research-based documentary, text, and public engagement.

Peled’s work is grounded in storytelling. Whether through film, photography, installation or performance, she investigates societal structures—both intimate and institutional—with a distinct sensitivity to the political, cultural and emotional layers that shape them. Her early artistic explorations took the form of live video performances (VJ-ing), graphic design, and spatial video installations.

In her research, Nirit Peled will delve into memory and forgetting in the digital age. She investigates how our personal and collective memories are influenced by digital data and storage technologies, asking: What happens when nothing is forgotten, and everything is stored?

Matthew C. Wilson

Matthew C. Wilson is a filmmaker, artist, researcher, writer, and occasional curator. In his videos, sculptures, and installations, audiences encounter a variety of agents—commercial materials, non-humans, characters, and inter-subjective entities—entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects employ research-driven, context-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches to trace the historical inertia of modernity through current technological trends and ecological crises, projecting them into speculative futures.

In the Fellowship track, Wilson will explore the arrival of the morphovore: a speculative bio-computational organism that absorbs and processes form in order to grow, function or change.

By approaching the morphovore (from morpho = form and vore = eater) as a thought experiment rather than a fantasy creature, technological, philosophical, social and aesthetic questions emerge that deal with the post-silicon age: a future in which computers have become more vibrant, flexible and perhaps even organic. No longer hard machines, but systems that can change themselves - as living beings do.

Final Research Phase

Three years ago, the first group of Fellows – Špela Petrič, Tina Farifteh, and the collective ARK –started the NFF Fellowship Programme. The results of the second group – Radical Data, Simone C Niquille, and Victorine van Alphen – will be presented at the upcoming festival in the Storyspace exhibition. On September 30th, these makers will engage in conversation with the public to share their insights and experiences. At the same time, NFF 2025 marks the official launch of the third and final group of Fellows – Luna Maurer, Nirit Peled, and Matthew C. Wilson – who will conclude the programme with presentations of their research outcomes in 2026.

Supervision and Collaboration

The Fellowship Programme is an initiative of the NFF with support from the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund. The NFF selects the Fellows with input from external experts. The nine mid-career makers are guided by NFF Digital Culture Programmer Paulien Dresscher throughout their Fellowship. Over the course of three years, the programme collaborates with numerous organizations from the visual culture sector, including the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, MU Hybrid Art House, Nieuwe Instituut, Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, and Waag Futurelab. These partners support the makers with expertise and potential development of their research.

The Fellowship Programme is also in collaboration with the Creative Humanities Academy (CHA) of Utrecht University, and includes researchers from Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Erasmus University, and Leiden University. There are three milestone meetings per year where the Fellows present the status of their research to one another and to other experts.

Digital Culture at the NFF

Discover alternative forms of visual storytelling at the NFF. Watch, experience and marvel at the richness offered by Dutch digital culture. At the Storyspace exhibition, immerse yourself in digital culture productions in the hall of Neude Library from Friday 26 September to Thursday 2 October during NFF. With VR documentaries and experiences, immersive installations, gaming and performances, striking stories come to life in this exhibition.

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