Susannah Gent is a film maker & artist based in Sheffield (South Yorkshire UK).
Her experimental fiction and essayistic work, that spans two decades, explores the representation of subjectivity and alternative approaches to narrative.
Susannah's early short films, funded by the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and Fuji Film Scholoarships, have won numerous awards at international film festivals. Her feature film Jelly Dolly won the 'Best Film' award at the British Council’s 'Britspotting Showcase' in Berlin in 2005.
Between 2005 and 2010 Susannah worked in fine art taxidermy including a year-long residency at Bank Street Arts, during which Susannah embarked on a collaboration with poets Fay Musselwhite and Lindalee Welsh (Sheffield Poetry Festival 2010 and Off the Shelf literary festival, 2011).
Susannah is a founding member of the Walking Arts Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University. Outputs include Solar: Walking at the Speed of Light, an app that guides a walking trail from the city centre into the Peak District based on a scaled down version of the solar system. Susannah's film for the planet Mars: Influence of Mars, screened at international film festivals in Oberhausen, Kassel, and Hamburg and was broadcast by the French / German channel Arte in 2020.
In 2020 Susannah achieved a full pass in her practice-based Ph.D., The Neuroscientific Uncanny: A Filmic Investigation of Twenty-First Century Hauntology. Filmic outputs of the research include Unhomely Street, a twenty minute short that explores hauntology and mental illness, premiered at the 63rd International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen, Scanner, a filmic experiment documenting an fMRI survey investigating the neurological underpinnings of the uncanny, and Psychotel, a sixty-minute essay film that investigates the uncanny.
Susannah's films were shown in a retrospective at the 66th International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen in 2020.
Susannah is currently in production with an adaptation of a short story by the Manchester based writer Nicholas Royle and is embarking on a new full length essay film that takes mythology around trees as a starting point.
Susannah is a Senior Lecturer in film and media production at Sheffield Hallam University.
