Film stills from ‘Crying for the Moon’ (Experimental Documentary, 9 min, 2024) and ‘The Beast in Me Manifesto’ (Documentary, 34 min, 2021).
Bonnie Whitehall is an multidisciplinary artist who works in film and textile art. She completed a MFA in Documentary Film Media in 2021 at Toronto Metropolitan University where she explored the essay film, slow cinema, observational documentary and hybrid storytelling.
Whitehall’s creative practice explores themes of vulnerability and care, grief and mourning rituals and female-driven storytelling. Her work intersects documentary and experimental forms of art making.
In 2023, she received Canada Council for the Arts funding to research and write her first feature length documentary script that explores mother/daughter relationships through the lens of art practice as healing. The project, ‘Golden Mimosa Symphony’ is currently in production.
Whitehall’s film work plays with montage, archival footage and home movies to compose her aesthetic style. Her short films have shown in Canada and Europe, including the Istanbul Experimental Film Festival in Turkey, the Visible Evidence XXVIII Conference in Gdansk, Poland and the Made by Women Independent Film Festival in Salzburg, Austria.
More recently, Whitehall has started a weaving practice where she is exploring how integral woven cloth is to human ritual and traceable throughout human existence.
Her practice is a combination of process-based, research creation and collaboration.
Photo credit: Judd Brucke, 2022 - Gage Park, Hamilton, ON
For more of my collaborative and independent work check out Judd Brucke.