Katarina Poljak  is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at The Kimmel Center, Vox Populi Gallery, and several international film festivals including ARFF Paris, Croatian Fashion Film, Indie Short,  and Rethink Dance. Her often performance based films are informed by a critique of social traditions and technology. Scenes located in her work immerse the audience in a fantastical universe steeped in retro futurism, sculptural set-design & ornate hand-made costumery.  She has been greatly influenced by her collaborations with experimental film and performance artist Kathy Rose and is 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 she studied both Dance and Film, and was awarded the Shannon D. Moore major film award for her thesis film in 2019. She is interested in humanity’s trajectory into a posthumanism and how this is framed by our sense of  the idealized human body.  Her work evokes a sense of surrealist suspense, indulges in contemporary culture’s collective obsession with the spectacle of gore, and connects audiences to the viscerality of the grotesque. The imagery she compiles suggests an exaggerated evolution so extreme that we see the horrors of the glamorized human form.  Poljak’s latest film Incredible Machine Glassbody was selected, screened, and won at several international film festivals in 2020. She is currently a 2023 Artist in Residence at Mascher Space Cooperative, has received partial funding and is working to bring a new short film, Source Architecture, to life.