Alexandra Kumala works as an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Through moving image, sound, and text-based practices, she makes work that excavates silences, explores the language of absence, and finds ways to tell the many stories that are otherwise untranslatable and inexpressible.

Alexandra Kumala tells stories of the untranslatable and the inexpressible. Her films have screened at the Museum of Moving Image, Lichtblick-Kino, and at film festivals globally. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and anthology books, including “A History of Photography in Indonesia,” shortlisted for the Historical Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Born in Jakarta and formerly based in New York City, she was a recipient of the NYSCA Artists Grant, the Queens Arts Fund, the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music & Theatre, and the 2022 George Stoney Fellowship at The Flaherty. Her work has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Field, Indiespace, NYSCA, NYC DCLA, Queens Council on the Arts, and NYC MOME, among others. Previously, she worked in theatre and translation, both of which influence her filmmaking, and was one half of the team behind Sugar Nutmeg, the long-form podcast and platform focusing on Southeast Asia, named after the spices whose trade route shaped our world today. With a multicultural upbringing in seven cities across four continents, her storytelling has always involved multiple forms in multiple languages. Being a minority in all the places she has ever called home deeply shapes her work as an artist. Today, she makes films and writes essays about untranslatability and the constant shifting of borders, language, and power dynamics.