Ella Raidel is a filmmaker, visual artist, and interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of cinema, immersive media, and artistic research. Her work explores how filmmaking can function as a method of inquiry—engaging with questions of space, ecology, memory, and urban transformation.
Working across film, 360° VR, and site-specific installations, she approaches cinematic practice as a performative and spatial process. Her projects often unfold in rapidly changing environments, where architecture, landscape, and infrastructure become active agents in the narrative. Blending documentary and speculative elements, her films examine the frictions between reality and fiction, past and future, human and non-human perspectives.
Her works have been presented internationally at film festivals, exhibitions, and cultural institutions. A Pile of Ghosts (2021) received the Award of Excellence at the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo 2022 and was awarded the Outstanding Artist Award for Documentary and Fiction Film by the Federal Republic of Austria in the same year.
Ella Raidel is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she develops filmmaking as a form of artistic research. Her forthcoming book, Play Life: The Poetics of the Performative Documentary (Routledge), articulates this approach, examining how performativity in documentary film opens up speculative and transformative modes of engaging with reality.