I’m a researcher, curator, and essay filmmaker, based between Warsaw and Valencia, working at the intersection of film studies, visual culture, and critical animal studies.
I’m currently a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, where my dissertation explores representations of nonhuman life in postwar Polish nature and educational films. My research combines film theory, animal ethics, and posthumanist thought, with a focus on how cinema mediates interspecies relations.

Alongside my academic work, I am deeply engaged in practice-based research and the essay film form.
I head the Essay Film Studio at vnLab (Łódź Film School), where I supervise and produce experimental, research-driven audiovisual projects. My interest lies in the essay film as both a theoretical and creative method—a form that allows thinking through images, editing, and affect rather than words alone.

In my film work, I explore the spectral, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of the moving image. My recent video essay Re-membering Topsy (2022) was presented at the National Museum in Warsaw. I am also developing Animal Gaze, a found-footage research film supported by the Culture and Animals Foundation, and Life Is Movement: Polish Biological Cinema, an ongoing project on the aesthetics of observation and death in scientific films.

Before joining vnLab, I worked for many years as a film curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, where I curated thematic programs and retrospectives connecting film, ecology, and visual art. I also collaborate with film festivals such as New Horizons and Short Waves, programming essayistic and experimental works that blur boundaries between cinema and research.

Across these fields—academic, curatorial, and artistic—I understand cinema as a space of inquiry, a laboratory of perception, and a meeting point between human and nonhuman ways of seeing.

📧 Contact: m.matuszewski [at] uw.edu.pl