ANETA LESNIKOVSKA

After finishing her third year at the University of Kiril and Metodij in Macedonia (department History of Art and Archaeology), Aneta Lesnikovska goes to Holland and graduates at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in audiovisual design and new media. In her graduation year she is accepted as a film and media exchange student at the Cooper Union, New York. Shortly after her graduation she gets actively involved in the Euro­pean media art scene, having numerous exhibitions of her video and new media installations. Her work was shown at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, amongst others.

After focusing on developing her film directing and production skills, through the North by Northwest/East of Eden Media program, her first mockumentary feature Does it hurt? First Balkan Dogma was selected for the Berlinale Talent Campus, was nominated for a Tiger Award at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam 2007, and won the Special Jury Award for innovative filmmaking at the Bermuda International Film Festival 2007. The film was in competition at major festivals around the world (Buenos Aires, Taipei, Barcelona, Brussels, Bratislava, Wroclaw, Utrecht, Sofia, Ankara, Durban etc). This debut has more then 2.2 million views on the IFFR Tiger YouTube channel.

For the last few years she has worked as associate professor of digital film at Institute of Arts ArtEZ in The Netherlands and is a co-founder of Digital Film Lab; she was a script doctor at the talent campus at Sarajevo Film festival 2010. In April 2011 she finished her specialization at the Binger Film Lab within the Company! Program for talented and upcoming producers; at IFFR 2012 she was guest expert advisor at Cinemart. She is currently working at the MA graduate department of The Dutch National Film School as a guest teacher and she is developing the transmedia project Loud. The story research for Loud was done at Binger Film Lab, with a research scholarship from the Nipkow program in Berlin and script development support from the Dutch Film Fund. Loud is financially supported by the Macedonian Film Fund and MEDIA.