about
Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker who has exhibited across UK including Barbican, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery as well as internationally in Paris, Berlin, Bogotá and Toronto.
Her art practice combines collective research, devised theatre, screen writing and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. In 2015, Eelyn's award-winning short film Life and Deaf screened at the Berlinale and in 2017 Creature of the Estuary was selected for the International Fiction Programme at the Bogota Short Film Festival. Monster [2015] features BAFTA / Palme d’Or winner, Anamaria Marinca and Kingsley Ben-Adir [who played Bob Marley in One Love], and was selected for the BAFTA qualifying Aesthetica film festival.
Eelyn's Hong Kong/English heritage motivates her interest in race, identity and ’othering’. In 2021 she completed Casting Fu Manchu, a ‘lockdown’ film that sees eleven actors of East and Southeast Asian heritage subvert the racist character, Dr Fu Manchu. Her moving image work, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 was selected for the New Art Exchange Open 2024, where Eelyn was awarded one of the main prizes.
Eelyn has recently completed Born on Sunday Silent, a short film funded by BFI Network and is currently developing her debut narrative feature film. Both films explore hidden stories from Britain's colonial past through genre based story-telling.
Watch Eelyn's narrative genre showreel here.
Download CV here
Artist's Statement
I am interested in groups of people, both in the making of the work and as a subject. By applying improvisation techniques usually associated with devised theatre, I like to work with an ensemble of collaborators to create content for live perfomance and moving images. This process can mean re-imagining people, place and stories to create a new mythology.
Ultimately, I am seeking to find new ways of constructing narrative within an emotional landscape, one that links places with people, story and memory, simultaneously capturing past, present and future, myth and reality.
