materials, language, memory, and time
Stephanie Dudley is a Toronto-based filmmaker working across stop-motion animation, analogue film, and material-driven processes. Her practice engages tactile methods including fermented and distressed 16mm film, physically printed and scanned text, and macro photography.
Her previous short film, Little Theatres: Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage, screened internationally, including at TIFF and the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Moving away from traditional narrative, her work takes sensory, poetic forms that attend to what persists beneath visibility and language.
Her current film, Invisible Harvests, is presented in both English and French, with hand-animated text integrated in each language. The film was selected for the Official Short Films Competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2026. It traces cultural transmission through processes of erosion and change, asking what remains as forms shift over time.
CV
I’ve been collecting word histories — especially those that once described a gesture, relation, or lived experience, and over time have settled into abstraction. I’m interested in this drift: how language moves away from embodied experience into stable concepts, and how easily we forget these more physical roots. This research is currently at the heart of my next film, The Etymology of Attention.