Salomé Lamas is a Portuguese filmmaker, visual artist, and educator. Over the past fifteen years, with a consistent output of more than thirty projects, her work has been contextualized within visual culture, art studies, and film studies. It's been exhibited and distributed internationally across the fields of cinema and contemporary art galleries, museums, art fairs, and biennials. She studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Contemporary Art Studies in Coimbra.
Her work has been screened at art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, Locarno, BAFICI, Fid Marseille, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Mostra de São Paulo, Anthology Film Archive, BAMPFA, Viennale, Culturgest, Hong Kong Film Festival, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Bozar, Louvre, Tabakalera, Batalha Center for Cinema, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, CAC Vilnius, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, SESC Brazil, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others.
Lamas’ fellowships include those at the Harvard’s Gardner Film Study Center, Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, Fundación Botín, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Fundación’ La Caixa’, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance Institute, Luso-American Development Foundation, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, and Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD.
Lamas is regularly invited to collaborate with art, film, and teaching institutions. She is an assistant guest professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidade de Lisboa, collaborated with the School of Arts of Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha of Politécnico de Leiria, Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola, and the Diriyah Art Futures Center, among others. She was a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard, and a visiting scholar at the Northwestern University Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. She collaborates with the production companies O Som e a Fúria, Primeira Idade, Folk Film, and is represented by Kubik Gallery and Galeria Miguel Nabinho. After being in the direction of Associação Portuguesa de Realizadores she founded, with support from a group of artists, Associação Portuguesa de Artistas Visuais em Portugal. Lamas is represented in several public and private collections.
At MacDowell in 2013, Lamas completed a video installation commissioned by the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea Chiado, acquired by the Portuguese National Contemporary Art Collection. She also finished editing Theatrum Orbis Terrarum for its premiere at DocLisboa and the Rome International Film Festival. In 2018, she worked on the final iteration of Fatamorgana, a project exploring identity and geopolitics in the Middle East. She also worked on the script for the feature film Gold and Ashes and on a commission for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. During her 2022 Fellowship, she completed the script for Gold and Ashes, which was set to be produced by O Som e a Fúria. She was also available to the line producer of Pantheras. In 2023, she organized and selected materials from her archive for the book Salomé Lamas: Parafiction II (selected works), which covers her last seven years of practice, serving as a natural continuation of a previous volume that spanned 2010-2016. She was also available remotely to the editor of Gold and Ashes.
During her 2025 Fellowship, she completed edits for Salomé Lamas: Parafiction II, which is expected to be released in the fall by Mousse Publishing. She is preparing the shooting of Pantheras, a film that explores smuggling ideologies and clandestine economies in Nigeria – it's scheduled to premiere in 2026-2027. Gold and Ashes (2025) is currently touring the festival circuit, and the record-cum-publication Gold and Ashes was just released by Mousse Publishing.
