Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker/artist whose films have screened internationally at film festivals and in museums including Locarno, Rotterdam, Sundance, SXSW, CPH:DOX, New Directors/ New Films, Mar del Plata, Vancouver, London’s ICA, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art and have aired on PBS, IFC, the Sundance Channel and the Criterion Channel. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships as well as the Chicken & Egg Award from Chicken and Egg Pictures, honoring women filmmakers who have made a significant contribution to the documentary field.
Her feature documentary Where Are You Taking Me?, shot in Uganda, was commissioned by and premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam followed by screenings at the Los Angles Film Festival and MoMA's Documentary Fortnight. Where Are You Taking Me? was theatrically released by Icarus Films, where it was a Critics’ Pick by Time-Out New York and LA Weekly, and was described by The New York Times as, “Fascinating … an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.”
Her recent documentary Onlookers (2023)—an immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos—premiered at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou and the Slamdance Film Festival where it was awarded an Honorable Mention for Breakout Features. In 2024, Metrograph at Home featured a one-month streaming retrospective of Takesue's films available throughout the U.S. Onlookers was acquired by the Bibliothèque publique d'information du Centre Pompidou for distribution throughout the public library system in France. In 2025, Takesue had a mid-career retrospective at the Asian Film Archive in Singapore and NTU-Center for Contemporary Art. She is Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.
During her MacDowell residencies, Takesue has edited her first film, Summer of the Serpent; edited and completed her film 95 And 6 To Go; begun work on a several new screenplays, edited an experimental and an observational documentary; and has worked on an experimental documentary and installation piece tentatively titled Foreign Exchange. In 2025, she'll be working on editing a documentary about Cambodian tour guides who lead visitors to dark tourism sites featuring wartime atrocities.
Portrait by Richard Beenen
