Katarina Poljak is an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary performance artist whose work has been shown at The Kimmel Center, Vox Populi Gallery, Icebox Project Space, and several international film festivals including ARFF Paris, Croatian Fashion Film, Indie Short, and Rethink Dance. Their often performance based films are informed by a critique of social traditions and technology. Scenes located in their work immerse the audience in a fantastical universe steeped in retro futurism, sculptural set-design & ornate hand-made costumery.  They have been greatly influenced by their collaborations with experimental film and performance artist Kathy Rose and are invested in continuing to create work that references both the past and future of mass culture, and the unspoken boundaries that define our social lives.

Poljak received a BFA from University of the Arts, where they studied both Dance and Film, and was awarded the Shannon D. Moore major film award for their thesis film in 2019. They are interested in humanity’s trajectory into a "posthumanism" and how this is framed by our sense of  the idealized human body.  Their work evokes a sense of surrealist suspense, indulges in contemporary culture’s collective obsession with the spectacle of gore, and connects audiences to the visceral nervous system of the grotesque. The imagery they compile suggests an exaggerated evolution so extreme that we see the horrors of the glamorized human form.  Poljak’s latest film Incredible Machine Glass Body was selected, screened, and won at several international film festivals in 2020. They are currently a 2023 Artist in Residence at Mascher Space Cooperative, where they continue to curate interdisciplinary performative work involving projection and the body and is working to bring a new short film, Source Architecture, to life.