BIOGRAPHY
Isabel Rocamora is a film director and artist working with the moving image and still photography. Her practice originated in performance, with live works commissioned by institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, and the Arts Council of England.
Awarded internationally, her moving image works have been commissioned by and curated worldwide in galleries and museums, festivals and for broadcast, and are held in several international collections.
Isabel holds a PhD in film and philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. Her scholarly writing and education work are located at the intersections of cinema, visual art and philosophy.
Conceived as meditations on contemporary ethics, Rocamora’s work destabilises ideas of social unchangeability by interrogating the complex bond people hold to history in legacies of trauma. Recent films consider the relationship between exile and selfhood, the moral consequences of military violence, and issues of faith and difference at the heart of contemporary conflict.
Her intricately choreographed mise-en-scènes often focus on the performative nature of human gesture and its relationship to individual and cultural identity. Highlighting the significance of place, the expansive landscapes in her images reveal their presence as history-bearing sites. In this way, the bunker-strewn beaches of the Normandy Landings (Body of War) and the limitless valleys of the Judean desert (Faith) transcend the classical landscape to become, respectively, loci of trauma or spiritual retreat. Aiming to counter performance with testimony, these works solicit the viewer as witness rather than spectator – a relation that she considers to be facilitated by multi-channel formats and site-sensitive installation. She has in recent years developed a practice in medium format analog and digital still photography often in dialogue with/ curated alongside her films.
Isabel's current practice is driven by environmental concerns. She is currently completing Humilitas, a still photography and expanded media work that considers our geological belonging with the earth (Art and Nature Award, Catalan Pyrenees, funded by Centre d' Art La Panera and Lleida Municipality), and developing two film projects. The Deep turns to the rich and coveted geologies of Scotland to poetically examine the impact of fracking technologies on local communities, the earth and its atmospherics (R&D funded by Creative Scotland, in partnership with Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre). The Clearing is a medium-length essayistic work that attends to questions of nature and value while interrogating anthropocentric perspectives.
Rocamora's films have screened at festivals and in filmothèques globally and have been commissioned and purchased for television broadcast (Channel 4 UK; TV3 Catalonia. Her single and multi-screen works have exhibited at, notably: CCC Palazzo Strozzi Florence, Museum of Modern Art Bologna, National Museum of Photography Copenhagen, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Beijing, Arizona State University Art Museum and the Austrian Cultural Forum NY. Her moving images have been selected for international surveys of videoart at, for instance, Arsenal Institute for Film and Videoart Berlin, Getty Center LA, FACT Liverpool, Artium Museum of Modern Art Vitoria, Arts Santa Monica Barcelona and The Venice Biennale (colaterali). Recently, alongside her solo exhibitions Troubled Histories, Ecstatic Solitudes at The Koffler Gallery Toronto, Ecstatic Solitudes at The Shaw Gallery Utah, and Imaging Faith at Summerhall Galleries Edinburgh, her work has shown at the Musée de la Civilisation, Quebec; MUNTREF Museum Buenos Aires, Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid, and (prior to the war on Ukraine) The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art Moscow, among others. She had two works exhibited in the Museum of Pontevedra (Galicia) for the 32 Pontevedra Art Biennial 2025.
Isabel holds a PhD in film and philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, where she has also taught Film Studies (2015-2019), and a BA Hons in Drama and Film from the University of Bristol. She was Visiting Scholar at Pompeu Fabra University in 2020-2022 and has held visiting lectureships in cinema and artist moving image practice at Edinburgh Napier University, Barcelona International Film School and Instituto Europeo Di Design. She has been widely invited to give artist talks (Stills Gallery Edinburgh; Architects’ Association London; Royal Art Circle Barcelona; Hamidrasha School of Art Israel; A. M Qattan Foundation Ramallah, Occupied Palestinian Territories); and has delivered papers at academic conferences such as Film Philosophy (universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Lisbon) and the British Society for Phenomenology (National University of Ireland), and by invitation (universities of Brown, Dundee, Frankfurt). Authored publications on her practice include an artist monograph Horizon of Exile (Sala Parpalló, 2009); an essay on Residual (Re-imagining the City of Bristol, Watershed, 2006); and, most recently, a chapter on the philosophies, aesthetics and performance principles that ground the ethical preoccupations of her film-making, in Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice (eds. Marion Schmid and Kim Knowles, Edinburgh University Press, Feb. 2021). Her scholarly writings have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Journal of Aesthetics and Culture (2023) and The New Review of Film and Television (2026, forthcoming).
Isabel lives and works between Scotland and Barcelona.