Riot Acts

the filmmakers

Madsen Minax: Director/Editor/Producer

Madsen Minax is a filmmaker, musician and multi-media artist come hell-raiser currently living and working in Chicago, IL. After studying quartet composition in Utrecht, The Netherlands, tattoo apprenticing in San Francisco, and earning his BFA in film and sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he survives in the real world/supplements his filmmaking, songwriting obsessions by editing educational films, serving coffee drinks and giving mediocre tattoos out of his basement.

Madsen is an enthusiast of destroying and rebuilding boundaries. He co-curates a quarterly screening series called Threat Level Queer Shorts, recently starred in and co-directed the Chicago based hit homo short, Queer Teen Romance (2009), as well as the experimental animation Their Body Is... (2005), and consistently tours with the performance duet Actor Slash Model (2006-present) and the band The Homoticons (2009-present)

Madsen will be entering the Graduate Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in the fall of 2010.

Simon Strikeback: Producer

Simon Strikeback is an activist and educator focusing on queerness, gender studies and performance, and has been an organizer of various campaigns and gatherings, primarily related to queer and transgender issues for the past ten years. While pursuing a women's studies degree at DePaul University, Simon became interested in justice organizing around workers' rights and queer visibility projects. From 1999-2005, he was a lead organizer with Camp Trans, a protest and community space fighting for the inclusion of transwomen at the annual Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. In this vein, he has given presentations at numerous universities throughout the US, addressing ideas of feminism as it relates to transgender issues.

Simon was born into a family of musicians and was trained from an early age. After playing in many groups throughout the years, it was while living at a queer arts commune in rural Tennessee that he began to play the ukulele and sing, while developing an appreciate for traditional bluegrass music. This led to Simon's involvement in the music performance project, Actor Slash Model.

He recently completed a Masters Degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Chicago, and is also the editor of the self-produced zine Bound To Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet.

Malic Amalya: Cinematographer

Malic Amalya is a femme-identified transgender filmmaker, currently living in Seattle. He has been heavily influenced by his grandfather's old 8mm home movies, and the fierce politics of Riot Grrrl and queercore punk rock. Preferring to work in 16mm film, Malic pays particular attention to the movement of color, light, and film grain.

Malic holds an MFA in Film/Animation/Video from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College. His experimental films have screened across North America, including the TIE Cinema Exhibition in Montreal, the Takoma Park Film Festival in Maryland, and the Olympia Film Festival in Washington State. He has also presented his work at Yale University; Sissies Artist Talks in Portland, OR; the TransSomatechnics Conference held at Simon Fraser University; and Threat Level Queer Shorts in Chicago.

Malic has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center and Blue Sky Project in Dayton, OH, and has received production grants from the Northwest Film Forum and Jack Straw Productions in Seattle, WA. For more information about Malic's work, visit: www.malicamalya.com.