Rasel Ahmed is a community-based filmmaker who uses traditional cinematic tropes and techniques to combine documentary with fantasy. Characters in his films function as an anchor to synthesize the iconography, visual metaphor, and psychogeography of cinematic spaces. Ahmed's experimental videos are a means to explore his dialogical relationship with displacement, citizenship, border, and loneliness. He uses a combination of participatory documentation, archival research, and collaborative re-enactment to finalize the performance and movement choices in the film. Ahmed has an MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Moving Image from Columbia University. He also runs a community-based transnational Queer archive and is the founder of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine Roopbaan. He is the recipient of Freedom From Religion Foundation Award, Center Global Leadership Award, Atlas Corps Fellowship, Royal Commonwealth Society Associate Fellowship, Point Foundation Scholarship, GAAPA/Prism Foundation Scholarship, Davis-Putter Scholarship, Chinn Scholarship, Chowdhury Center Fellowship, Columbia University Visual Arts Scholarship, Swedish Institute Leadership Fellowship, and State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program.
