Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, structural film, formal experimentation, the cultic milieu, counterculture, the built environment, Afro-Caribbean, East Asian, and British histories are all mainstays. In 2024, Quaintance was the second Woonhuis Fellow at the De Ateliers institute in Amsterdam.
His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts in San Francisco, Konsthall C in Sweden, David Dale in Glasgow, European Media Art Festival in Germany, Alchemy Film and Arts Festival in Scotland, Images Festival in Toronto, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami. In 2023, a retrospective of Quaintance's work was showcased at the Museum of Modern Art.
He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, the ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival in Hamburg, the Jean Vigo Award for Best Director at Punto de Vista in Spain, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX in Denmark, the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde in Portugal, and the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival in Santiago de Compostela.
At MacDowell, Quaintance “read like a madman” while working on two significant projects: his first novel You, The Interviewer; and his most recent medium-length film Available Light. Both works explore the same period of time spent in Tokyo in 2024, engaging with the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum and the existential conditions of living in Japan's capital post-pandemic.
