Elliot Montague

Elliot’s films explore the nuances of trans and queer narratives through an engagement with kinship, the familial, the spectral, and rurality. Informed by the Slow Cinema movement and situated within Trans New Wave Cinema, his work explores intergenerational narratives that bring forward magical realism and the folkloric within a meditative pace. Elliot’s most recent film work focuses on the overlapping experiences between the pregnant and birthing body and transgender and gender expansive identities. This three-part series, The Birthing Series, is a body of work that unpacks how we think about transitions, from life to afterlife, dying to death; pregnancy to childbirth; child to parent and vice versa; outside of linear time. This series challenges the sensationalizing of “transitions” within mainstream transgender narratives that rely on pathological medicalization of the trans body within cis-normative, linear and capitalist time.

Over the past two decades, Elliot's award-winning films have received international recognition at over 80 festivals, museums, and venues, including the Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Dashanzi Arts Festival in Beijing, The Queens Museum of the Moving Image in NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, among others. Elliot is a twice recipient of the prestigious Princess Grace Award from the Princess Grace Foundation and his films are partially distributed through Women Make Movies and Video Data Bank. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Production at Mount Holyoke College.