Angelo Madsen — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca, De La Warr Pavilion, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and has participated in residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, "North By Current" (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, "North By Current" has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. "Madsen", as friends call him, is an an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, and is currently releasing A Body To Live in (2025), about the world of body modification as documented through the lens of photographer and performance artist Fakir Musafar.

Single channel film and video works are available from the Video Data Bank (various titles), Outcast Films (Riot Acts), and Grasshopper Film (North By Current), Mubi (One Night At Babes), and the New York Times (Stay with me, the world is a devastating place).