Emily Drummer is a filmmaker whose process-driven work is rooted in immersive fieldwork and historical research, reimagining cinematic conventions to craft meditative worlds that are thought, felt, and sensed.
She received her M.F.A. in film and video production from the University of Iowa and her B.A from Hampshire College. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from MacDowell, New York State Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Princess Grace Foundation, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her short films Field Resistance (2020), Histories of Simulated Intimacy (2017), and Behind the Torchlight (2015) have been showcased by venues including Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Block Museum at Northwestern University, London Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, among others. She edited Marianne (dir. Rebecca Ressler, 2022), a documentary about the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Marianne Wiggins, which won the Special Youth Jury Award at Visions du Réel. Drummer co-authored the article "Whispers Heard at the Pictures: women’s work in early cinema" with Lise Sanders, which was published in the 2021 volume of Early Popular Visual Culture. Essays about her work have recently been published in Millennium Film Journal and the Brooklyn Rail.
While at MacDowell, Drummer edited her film In the Keeping, which explores the human pursuit of an ideal image in the ever-changing, unwieldy body of a fish. Centered on the life cycle of koi fish, an ornamental variety of the common carp, the film explores global trade, environmental history, and the commodification of nonhuman life. Using the fish as a vantage point, it exposes the hidden infrastructures that shape commodified animals, revealing a dynamic landscape where humans and the natural world are inextricably bound. She received grants from the LEF Moving Image Fund in 2024 and the New York State Council for the Arts in 2025 to complete the project.
Portrait by Fred Schmidt Arenales
