Adina Pintilie

Adina Pintilie was born in 1980 in Bucharest. She studied directing at the Theatre and Cinema University of Bucharest. In 2007, her medium-length film Don’t Get Me Wrong premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, where it was part of the Official Selection in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition. Three years later, her short film Oxygen premiered in the Official Competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival. In 2018, her first feature film, Touch Me Not, was selected for the Official Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. Pintilie’s work thrives at the boundary between fiction and reality, emerging from investigative and creative processes around themes such as intimacy, contemporary body politics, and participatory practices with significant community impact. Her projects stand out for their bold exploration of the human body and mind while simultaneously questioning the conventions of cinematic language. Pintilie’s latest art project / exhibition You Are Another Me - A Cathedral of the Body, curated by Cosmin Costinas and Viktor Neumann, was selected to represent Romania at the Venice Art Biennial 2022, where it unveiled a series of new works by the artist: film installations, a cinematic sculpture, a VR installation. The exhibition has been received with significant acclaim by both international and national media and art professionals, ranking the Romanian Pavilion among the top 10 best international pavilions in major art and culture publications worldwide, such as The Guardian, Artnews, The Art Newspaper, Vogue Magazine, Artpress, Artnet, German TV channel ARD and many others. The exhibition has traveled internationally, being presented for in an expanded version at the WKV Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (Oct 2023 - Jan 2024). On this occasion, Pintilie created the new performative-cinematic installation Waffenstillstand (Weapons Standing Still), - produced by WKV and MANEKINO FILM - which takes further the artist's ongoing investigations on language, on the relation between reality and cinema, between body and space, between performer and spectator. In Oct 2023, Migros Museum for Contemporary Art Zurich commissioned Pintilie to create a new artwork from the Cathedral of the Body series - the cinematic installation ‘The Womb’ - which was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection, and also presented in the group exhibition ‘Interdependencies: Perspectives on Care and Resilience’ (Oct 2023 - Jan 2024). Since October 2022, Adina Pintilie has been Professor for Film at the HFBK University of Arts Hamburg.