Elliot Montague

  • Assistant Professor of Film Media Theater Film Production
Elliot Montague

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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 and his films are partially distributed through and .

Areas of Expertise

Film production and screenwriting with an emphasis on narrative and experimental genres, queer and trans representation within cinema.

Education

  • M.F.A., University of California-San Diego
  • B.F.A., Hampshire College

Recent Awards

Montague, E. (2023) , (begins at 0:35:30).

Montague, E. (2020) .

Montague, E. (2020) .

Montague, E. (2020) Light on a Path, Follow, has screened internationally at over 30 festivals, museums and events since its release in 2020. It was awarded Best of Show: Short Films at the Boston LGBTQ Film Festival and received Honorable Mention at the Deep Focus Film Festival in Brooklyn, NY.

Recent Honors

Elliot Montague was a script consultant for the screenplay adaptation of Ocean Vuong’s award-winning novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which is being produced by A24 Films.

Elliot Montague presented his recent film, Light on a Path, Follow, as part of the Trans*Revolutions Virtual Symposium, presented by Barnard Center for Research on Women. This virtual symposium featured artist-activists whose work is inspired by and engaged in imagining trans* and genderqueer histories, performances, identities, and aesthetics.

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