Bea Mariano
Bea Mariano's personal art practice is rooted in experimenting with both still and moving images, space, sound and text. She is interested in ideas of representation, histories, psychoanalysis, decoloniality, ethics, theory, the mundane, repair and co-creation.
In 2022, she was a digital fellow of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s Leaky Archive project, where she engaged with the institution’s colonial photographs collection. An offshoot of her in-progress, unpublished hybrid text works from the early 2010s, as well as her research on mimicry and the representation of indigenous people in Philippine paintings during the American colonial period, was her experimental film, Dominion. It was also commissioned by Los Otros for Asian Artist Moving Image Platform in the same year.
Dominion has been screened and programmed at Seoul International Women's Film Festival, QCinema International Film Festival, art + film + vienna, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Gawad CCP Para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video (Gawad Alternatibo) (Honorable Mention), Art in Country of Tokyo, Pugnant Film Series, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, among others. It will be screened at a forthcoming program of Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues.
Her other filmic works include Walang Orasan sa Bahay na Ito (2025), The Morning Trembles (2024), Wound Cities (2019), Ang Persistensiya ng Alaala (2018), Kasaysayan sa mga Pagitan (2016), and Mistake, Momentum, Memory: Sisyphean Reparations (2013).
In 2025, she initiated WE Film PH (Women/'s Experimental Films / Filmmakers PH), envisioning it both as research into the history of women experimental filmmakers in the Philippines and a database. Through this platform, she programs — and wants to continue to program with the help of friends — a feminist salon and screening series of experimental films, moving images, video art and other time-based media by Filipino women, nonbinary, queer and trans artists, writers and filmmakers.
Other projects she's working on are Dalumat, Dalamhati, Dignidad – an online journal of/about decoloniality, and Manifest – an electronic literature project – with Xyh Tamura. She was also a fellow for poetry in Filipino at the 14th Ateneo National Writers Workshop.
Coding web and mobile apps as a day job, she also assists in various community initiatives and is a part-time developer for Cinemata, a video platform for social issue films about the Asia-Pacific. Occasionally, she translates articles for human rights organizations.
A part of her practice is community-engaged, starting with volunteering for Back to Square 1/Juan (BS1)’s Off-Site/Out of Sight exhibit (2015) and from early 2017 continues with Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings (RESBAK).
She received her BA in Art Studies from the University of the Philippines Diliman and is based in Metro Manila, Philippines.