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Alexandra Porter (English and Scottish descent) has lived in Aotearoa since 1993. She enjoys collaborative projects and especially, playing with photography, audio and words.

She graduated Ilam School of Fine Arts, UC with a MFA (Film) in 2012. As a Fine Arts filmmaker she enjoys weaving autobiographical facts and fictions into lyrical, cinematic compositions with narrative montage. Her projects are influenced by primitive cinema, the 1930s General Post Office films of New Zealand artist and icon, Len Lye, the 1970s short films of English auteur, Peter Greenaway and an on-going meditation with life.

As writer/director/co-producer her three short films; Super8man (2005) and A Sense of Place (2009) funded by CNZ’s Innovation Production Fund, and N or Nor W; study of a Canterbury wind (2011) submitted as part of her MFA submission, were collaborations with critically acclaimed south island based DOP, John Chrisstoffels and Producer, Rick Harvie (Belmont Productions). Festival screenings have included Cork International Film Festival (Ireland), Los Angeles International Film Festival (USA) and Oneovideo International Grape and Wine Film Festival (France).

Porter assisted on Chrisstoffels’ PhD moving-image installations and final ‘time-based’ art submission, titled Ritornello, 2018 (16mm B&W film) exhibited online by City Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū, Christchurch/Ōtautahi in 2020. Porter Pictures co-produced Christchurch based artist and writer/director, Ed Lust’s New Zealand Film Commission Fresh Short titled, Fling (2019) and is currently producing Chrisstoffels’ debut independent New Zealand feature documentary, Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace (2022), now entering the International Film Festival circuit.

Porter’s montage-photographs and installations have been exhibited in local galleries – ArtBox, NEXT Gallery and the City Art Depot; the (former) New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington; and the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin.

Porter has collaborated with New Zealand artist and painter, Julia Holden, on archival sound acquisition and production. Porter produced multiple archival soundscapes for Holden’s Lyttelton walking tour exhibition made in partnership with Lyttelton and Canterbury Museums, Lyttelton Redux (2016-17), and created an audio montage musing titled, A Meditation on Domesticity, in response to Holden’s portrait show, Her Indoors (2019) at Sergeant Gallery, Wanganui. She was one of Holden’s collective artist-subjects in Christchurch shows, It’s like now (2014) and I’m Your Fan (2016).

Porter Pictures website and contact details: https://www.porterpictures.co.nz/