Michael O’Pray Prize

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative launched in 2017 in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England. The prize seeks new writing on innovation and experimentation in moving-image art. Read the winning texts below.

One must have blind faith in ideology

2025 WINNER | Ricardo Reverón Blanco on a Cuban filmmaker suppressed both at home and abroad

Opensecret

2025 AWARDEE | Emily Morley examines a new mode of distributed filmmaking

Communist Dislocations

2025 AWARDEE | Oliver Dixon revisits the work of experimental documentary filmmakers

Not to Scale

2024 WINNER | Bami Oke examines Garrett Bradley’s embodied video reflection on US culture

The Screen is a Drum

2024 AWARDEE | E De Zulueta explores the delirious resistance of Mexican filmmakers Colectivo los ingrávidos

Looking at Palestine

2024 AWARDEE | Nevan Spier views Palestine through the films of Mustafa Abu Ali and Elia Suleiman

Dreaming Rivers

2023 WINNER | Leena Habiballa considers the physical reworking of a pioneering film’s 16mm print

Excavating the Body

2023 AWARDEE | Natasha Thembiso Ruwona explores Ashanti Harris’s Black Gold

Queer Territories/Lesbian Lenses

2023 AWARDEE | Aislinn Evans critically examines a lesbian relation to histories of the land and landscape cinema

In Defence of the Small Screen

2022 WINNER | Laura Bivolaru on viewing the moving image while moving

I Am a Photograph

2022 WINNER | Evelyn Wh-ell examines two French trans icons’ focus on image as surface

Going on a Bear Hunt

2022 AWARDEE | Dan Guthrie tries to imagine the experience of an elusive artwork

Robert Beavers

2022 AWARDEE | Siavash Minoukadeh on the power of oblique suggestion in queer cinema

Out in the Open

2021 WINNER | Sara Quattrocchi Febles explores how a film can no longer be fixed in time and place when screened outdoors

Blank Space

2021 AWARDEE | Ronnie Angel Pope enters a cinematic void

Danielle Dean

2021 AWARDEE | Rosa Tyhurst on Danielle Dean’s subverting of the vampiric strategies at work in brand marketing

Lutz Mommartz’s Own Private Idyll

2020 WINNER | Mimi Howard finds that there are oblique ways to engage with tumultuous times

Alberta Whittle: RESET

2020 AWARDEE | Harvey Dimond explores the historical resonances of this slavery-referencing artwork made during a suffocating pandemic

Together, Alone: Watching Sandra Lahire in Lockdown

2020 AWARDEE | Rachel Pronger discovers in earlier experimental films a familiar tension between the social being and the individual body

Image Abrasion

2019 WINNER | Cassandre Greenberg considers Derek Jarman’s Blue as a celluloid artefact in an age of portable digital media

Patrick Staff: On Venus

2019 WINNER | Laura Jacobs on hostile environments, both social and natural, in Patrick Staff’s ‘On Venus’ exhibition

Bank – Basement – Becker

2018 WINNER | Adam Hines-Green on the expression of horror through both fiction and reality in the LA video art of Julie Becker

A Long Shot

2017 WINNER | Dan Ward on artists’s attempts to slow the viewer

Heat Sensitive?

2017 WINNER | Lauren Houlton on Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’