Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, a professor of film and media arts at Brooklyn College, and a co-founder of In Parenthesis – a nonprofit theater and media arts company. She makes films questioning documentary with animation, memory with poetry, performance with behavior.
At MacDowell in 2015, she worked on post-production of a short stop motion animation documentary, Little Fiel, which premiered at 2017 DOC NYC, and went on to play at more than 80 film festivals worldwide. The film won 20 awards, including Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film at 2019 Boulder International Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Charlotte and BlackStar film festivals. She also re-edited the third part of her documentary feature Socrates of Kamchatka.
During her 2025 residency, Patkanian edited Firebird - a “fairy-doc”, combining stop motion animation of actors and 2D puppets, documentary, and collage art. It is about the Russian war on Ukraine; about the deathless evil that has been haunting Russia since Ivan the Terrible; as well as resistance and resilience of refugees. It is an adaptation of an old slavic tale.
