Petra Totten

Petra Totten is an Emmy Award-Winning filmmaker and video artist currently based in Toronto, Ontario. Her work has been screened in galleries and festivals in Europe, Asia, and North America. She is currently completing a PhD in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

Petra holds a BA ’18 in Media Arts Studies and an MFA ’21 in Documentary Media. Currently working as a freelance editor, Petra is actively working on a personal docuseries on the Divine Feminine, as well as multiple creative and academic publications.

Petra’s work is exploratory in nature, seeking to highlight the beauty in lived experience; utilizing the essay film form and visual anthropology to represent communities in ways grounded in care and mutual respect. Her research interests include nonfiction film, trans* studies, and how the two connect and inform one another, and she is especially interested in moving beyond benchmarks of visibility and representation to a more holistic view of marginalized experience. 

Selected Work

• Beyond Visibility as the Benchmark for Trans* Liberation, forthcoming 2023
• Movement Through Space: Deleuze's Theories on the Movement-Image and Documentary, Mise en Scene 6.1
• my body is a place, just like any other
• Selected Video Work
• Selected Installation Work