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ADFF / ADFF:NY / Speakers

NY Speakers

FILM GUIDESchedule

Kyle Bergman

Festival Director & Founder, ADFF




Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

Filmmakers

MUNDO FRÁGIL - 10/12
The World in a Square - 10/13
MUNDO FRÁGIL - 10/13

Smiljan Radić Clarke

Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Architect

MUNDO FRÁGIL - 10/12


Paul Goldberger

Architecture Critic

Googie - 10/15


Julie Lasky

Journalist

Out of the Picture - 10/14


Martino Stierli

Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA

MUNDO FRÁGIL - 10/12


Beatrice Galilee

Founder and Executive Director

Young Climate Stories - 10/15
Young Climate Stories - 10/17

Jake Gorst

Documentary Filmmaker and Director

Googie - 10/15
Googie - 10/16
Googie - 10/17

Nico Weber

Director

bauhaus forever. - 10/15
bauhaus forever. - 10/16
bauhaus forever. - 10/17

An.Ash Smolar

Director

Out of the Picture - 10/13
Out of the Picture - 10/14

Jonathan Goodman Levitt

Director

Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano) - 10/14
Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano) - 10/16
Five Living Buildings (by Renzo Piano) - 10/17

Sunena Maju

Design Critic, Architect and Festival Coordinator




Ruth Somalo

Senior Programmer




Hans den Hartog

Director

Máximapark- from Greenhouses to a Living Landscape - 10/15
Máximapark- from Greenhouses to a Living Landscape - 10/17

Mark Myers

Director

The Tower That Built A City - 10/15
The Tower That Built A City - 10/17

Martin Rein-Cano

Founder and Creative Director

The World in a Square - 10/13
The World in a Square - 10/17

Francisco ‘Pancho’ Brown

Senior Editor and Engagement Manager

Máximapark- from Greenhouses to a Living Landscape - 10/15


Kyle Bergman

Festival Director & Founder, ADFF

Architect Kyle Bergman founded the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) in 2008 and serves as its festival director. He has always recognized the strong connection between architecture and film and ADFF provides a unique opportunity to educate, entertain and engage people who are passionate about the world of architecture and design. Mr. Bergman also serves as vice president on the board of Pacific Rim Parks Organization whose mission is to use the process of designing and building parks as a tool to connect communities around the Pacific.

Kyle Bergman has been involved with design/build education since 1994 when he created and moderated an architectural lecture series about the design/build process for the Smithsonian Institute. An entrepreneur at heart, Mr. Bergman founded Alt Spec in 1999, a publishing company that produced a visual resource of unique and alternative products for architects and designers. He also produced a play entitled The Glass House, about the design and construction of two famous homes, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House.

Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

FilmmakersBêka & Lemoine

Artists-filmmakers working at the intersection of visual arts and non-fiction cinema, Bêka & Lemoine have, for twenty years, explored how people experience, perceive, and relate to space on emotional, social, and cultural levels through innovative narrative and cinematic forms. Their films have been widely screened and awarded at major international film festivals and exhibited in both solo and collective exhibitions at leading art and architecture institutions, including Fondation Beyeler (Basel), Fondation Cartier (Paris), Fondation Prada (Milan), MAXXI (Rome), the Venice Biennale (Venice), Barbican Art Gallery (London), among others. In 2016, MoMA (New York) acquired their complete body of work produced up to that date. Their films are part of other renowned collections including MAXXI (Rome), CNAP (Paris), and Fondazione Prada (Milan). They have directed over forty films, including Koolhaas Houselife (2008), Barbicania (2014), The Infinite Happiness (2015), Moriyama-San (2017), Tokyo Ride (2020), and the large film installation Homo Urbanus (2017–2027). In 2023, they published the book The Emotional Power of Space.

Smiljan Radić Clarke

Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Architect

Like his architecture, the layers of Smiljan Radić Clarke’s life form a noncontinuous history shaped by movement, openness, and the gradual construction of meaning. Born in Santiago to an immigrant family—his father’s parents from Brač, Croatia, and his mother’s from the United Kingdom—Radić grew up with a heightened awareness of belonging, fostering an understanding of life as something assembled, not merely inherited.

Radić’s work has been recognized with numerous international honors, including being named Best Architect Under 35 by the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile (Chile, 2001), the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award (United States, 2008), the Oris Award (Croatia, 2015), the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (United States, 2018), and the Grand Prize at the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito (Ecuador, 2022). He is an Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects and an Honorary Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, since 2009 and 2020, respectively.

Radić’s work has been featured in major exhibitions internationally, including Global Ends at Gallery Ma (Tokyo, Japan, 2010); Un Ruido Naranjo at Museum of Contemporary Art, (Hiroshima, Japan, 2012); The Wardrobe and the Mattress, Hermès Gallery, Tokyo, with Marcela Correa (Tokyo, Japan, 2013); Bus Stop for Krumbach at Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bergenz, Austria, 2013); Smiljan Radić: BESTIARY at TOTO Gallery Ma (Tokyo, Japan 2016); The House for the Poem of the Right Angle in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States, 2015–2016); and Guatero Bubble at the XXII Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Chile (Santiago, Chile, 2023).

Radić continues to live and work from Santiago, Chile, sustaining an intentionally intimate practice in which architecture remains personal, attentive, and deeply felt.

Paul Goldberger

Architecture Critic

Paul Goldberger (born December 4, 1950) is an American author, architecture critic and lecturer, widely known as contributing editor at Vanity Fair, architectural critic for The New York Times, and columnist of “Sky Line” for The New Yorker.

In 1984, while at The New York Times, Goldberger received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism.

Julie Lasky

Journalist

Julie Lasky is a journalist, editor and critic who specializes in design, architecture, and real estate. A widely published writer, she contributes a monthly column called “Living Small” to the New York Times real estate section and edits the domestic and international Special Design Report supplements produced by the Times. She is also a part-time assistant professor in the Industrial Design MFA program at Parsons School of Design.

Martino Stierli

Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMAMoMA

Martino Stierli is MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, a role he assumed in March 2015. Stierli oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design.

He is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (2013). He has organized and co-curated exhibitions on a variety of topics, including the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri, which was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. At MoMA, he has curated the exhibitions Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (with Vladimir Kulić, 2018), Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (with Evangelos Kotsioris, 2021), The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 (with Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson, 2022) and Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa (with Ikem Okoye, 2026). Stierli also oversaw the installation of the new Architecture and Design collection galleries in the expanded MoMA, which opened in October 2019, and curated numerous collection installations.

Previous to joining MoMA, Stierli was the Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Art History. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia University, the universities of Zurich and Basel, EPF Lausanne, and ETH Zurich, from where he holds a PhD. In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His scholarship has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including the ETH Medal of Distinction for Outstanding Research (2008), the Theodor Fischer Prize by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008), multiple publication and presentation grants from the Graham Foundation and the Swiss Art Award 2011 by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (for architectural criticism). His book Montage and the Metropolis was shortlisted for the 2018 Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association. The exhibition catalogue Toward a Concrete Utopia received the 2018 DAM Architecture Book Award by the German Architecture Museum, the 2019 Richard Schlagman Art Book Award in the category History of Architecture, and the 2021 Exhibition Catalogue Award by the Society of Architectural Historians.

Beatrice Galilee

Founder and Executive DirectorThe World Around

Beatrice Galilee is a London-born, New York-based writer and curator and is the founder and executive director of The World Around, the global platform for architecture and design. She is the author of Radical Architecture of the Future, published by Phaidon in 2021, and between 2014-2019 served as the first curator of contemporary architecture and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beatrice served as chief curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale; co-curator of 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, co-curator of 2009 Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Between 2010-2012 she launched and co-directed The Gopher Hole, an experimental exhibition and project space in London.

Jake Gorst

Documentary Filmmaker and DirectorMainspring Pictures Ltd

Jake Gorst is an Emmy® award winning documentary filmmaker and the Director of Mainspring Pictures Ltd.

Recent films directed by Gorst include “New England Modernism: Revolutionary Architecture in the 20th Century” (2024, Mainspring Narrative Films), “The Nature of Modernism: E. Stewart Williams, Architect” (2014, Design Onscreen), “Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island” (2012, Design Onscreen), “William Krisel, Architect” (2010, Design Onscreen), “Journeyman Architect: The Life and Work of Donald Wexler” (2009, Design Onscreen) and “Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs” (2006, Design Onscreen). His films “Farmboy” (2006, Jonamac Productions), and “Leisurama” (2005, Jonamac Productions), have been in national U.S. public television distribution.

Gorst has also been a contributing writer to VOX Hamptons, HOME Miami and Modernism magazines.

Nico Weber

Director

Nico Weber is a Berlin-based filmmaker, writer, producer, and visual artist working across cinema, television, installation, and artistic research. Trained in political science and philosophy, she came to filmmaking through political and cultural journalism. For more than twenty-five years, Weber has developed an independent essayistic practice concerned with architecture, memory, power, and the unstable boundary between documentary and fiction. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals, museums, and biennials and broadcast by ARTE, ZDF, 3sat, ORF, and other European networks. Bauhausfrauen. The Forgotten Pioneers of a Movement was nominated for a Grimme Award, while Inside Prora received international architecture-film awards. Through NOW Collective, Weber writes, directs, and produces films in which image, sound, rhythm, and space function as forms of thought. bauhaus forever. premiered in the Special Premieres section of CPH:DOX 2026.

An.Ash Smolar

Director

Born in Brussels, An.Ash Smolar studied at ERG (Ecole de Recherche Graphique), La Cambre (Visual Arts and animation cinema) and obtained a Master in Experimental Cinema at the San Francisco Art Institute. An. Ash Smolar is a multimedia artist and director of experimental films, documentaries, and animated films. They complement their practice by teaching animation at ERG. Their research focuses on narrative structures, the representation of gender and minorities, the politics of space, and the transmission of memory. Their work has been shown in Brussels, Paris, Montreal, San Francisco, New York, Vienna and Taiwan. They divide their career between their two passions, cinema and architecture. They made a dozen short films, installations and a feature-length film. Out of the picture is their second documentary.

 

Jonathan Goodman Levitt

DirectorChangeworx

Jonathan is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, artist, researcher, journalist, and educator. His films have screened at over 100 film festivals, won over 40 awards, and received support from BBC, PBS, Netflix, NHK-Japan, Ford Foundation, and Sundance Institute. His company Changeworx specializes in personalizing social issues, and has built stories from people’s unfolding lives over multiple years across five continents. In recent years, Jonathan’s artistic practice has focused on creating museum installations, most significantly for a Chinese exhibition about the architecture of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

Changeworx’s recent feature credits include the award-winning BEING BEBE (Tribeca; New York Times Critics Pick) about Cameroonian drag artist Marshall Ngwa, and AMONG THE BELIEVERS (Netflix; Spirit Award, Cinema Eye Honor, Fellini Prize, and Asia Pacific Screen Award nominee), about a firebrand Pakistani cleric and his students that played numerous festivals in over 25 countries. Jonathan’s Silver Telly-winner FOLLOW THE LEADER premiered during both the Democratic and Republican political conventions in the United States, and later aired widely around the world, timed to the American elections. His first feature SUNNY INTERVALS AND SHOWERS aired on BBC (Storyville), and received Grierson and Mental Health Media nominations.

Jonathan trained in documentary directing on a Fulbright Scholarship at the U.K.’s National Film and Television School (NFTS), after studying psychology, painting, and philosophy at Stanford University. His volunteer activities include serving on the Fulbright Association Board; leading the Research & Data Committee of the Documentary Producers Alliance; and co-mediating disputes in the arts via VLA’s MediateArt program. After spending the first half of his career in London, Jonathan moved to Brooklyn, where he lives with his family.

Sunena Maju

Design Critic, Architect and Festival Coordinator

Sunena Maju is an architect, writer, researcher, and curator with a background that weaves together architecture, design, and art. She has worked with organizations including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and STIRworld, where her work has centered on design histories, radical architectural practices, and cultural narratives. Sunena holds an MA in History of Design and Curatorial Studies from Parsons School of Design, where her research explored decolonizing design and curatorial practice. She is passionate about creating platforms that connect diverse audiences to design, architecture, and visual culture.

Ruth Somalo

Senior Programmer

Ruth is a Spanish programmer, curator and filmmaker based in NY. She is a Senior Programmer at DOC NYC and ADFF who also curates independent non fiction programs. She was the co-director of Impugning Impunity Human Rights Film Festival and worked for international festivals like DocumentaMadrid and Cuéntalo for several years. Ruth is the President of The Flaherty Board of Trustees and works as mentor and instructor at the UnionDocs summer documentary labs. As a filmmaker, her documentary and experimental work has been shown in theaters, festivals and museums internationally.

Hans den Hartog

Director
Hans den Hartog, filmmaker, born and raised in Utrecht – The Netherlands.
Filmography: Toos & Ron, to live and let go (2011) Shot in a hospice, a last home for terminal ill people. The Bird Ranger; no time, only tide (2015) Film about bird rangers in the Dutch Wadden Sea Islands, world heritage. The documentary has been screened on several film festivals in Holland and Europe. Wildlife Conservation Film Festival in New York, Environmental Film Festival DC-EFF in Washington DC, on board at KLM International and broadcasted on Dutch Public Television. Old Passioned (2018). SaltvsSweet – Breakthrough the Dike (2016 – 2027 expected) Film about the Fishmigrationriver, an ecoduct for fish through the Afsluitdijk. Maximapark – from greenhouses to a living landscape (2025)

Mark Myers

Director

Mark Myers is a Scarborough-born filmmaker, currently living downtown Toronto with his wife and two boys. His work spans documentary, commercial, music video, and narrative storytelling. Myers began his career in broadcast television at MuchMusic, and later worked at Vice, and Shopify. His work often explores culture, identity, and the stories behind influential people and places. The Tower That Built a City is his latest feature documentary and coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the CN Tower.

Martin Rein-Cano

Founder and Creative DirectorTopotek 1

Martin Rein-Cano, born in Buenos Aires in 1967, is a landscape architect, founder and creative director of Topotek 1. His studies in art history, which preceded landscape architecture, have ever since influenced the idea-driven design concepts of the Berlin and Zurich offices since 1996. In addition to his conceptual and interdisciplinary work, he lectures at various institutions in Europe and North America, most recently at the Dessau Institute for Architecture and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Francisco ‘Pancho’ Brown

Senior Editor and Engagement ManagerMETROPOLIS
Francisco ‘Pancho’ Brown is Senior Editor and Engagement Manager at METROPOLIS magazine and co-founder of Micropolitan studio, a multidisciplinary art and design collective working between New York and Sydney. He is on the Board of US Architects Declare and the Harvard Graduate School of Design Alumni Council. Pancho is an Associate AIA and has been invited previously to teach at Wentworth Institute and the Cornell School of Architecture.
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Sumbit Films

Submissions for the 2025/26 season are now closed.
We will begin accepting submissions for the 2026/27 season in January 2026.

Speakers NY