Samira Elagoz (1989, Helsinki) is a Finnish/Egyptian artist currently based in Amsterdam. She graduated as a choreography BA from the Amsterdam University of the Arts in 2016. She has toured with her works in various international film, visual art and performance contexts, such as IDFA, Impulstanz, CPH:DOX, Kaaitheater, The White Chapel Gallery, The EYE museum, Edinburgh Fringe and La Casa Encendida.

In 2014 Elagoz won the visual art competition Blooom Award in Cologne with her first short “Four Kings”. Her documentary-performance Cock, Cock.. Who’s There? won the prestigious Prix Jardin d’Europe competition at Impulstanz 2017. And at Edinburgh Fringe it won the Total Theatre Awards for Emerging talent. It was also nominated for the BNG Bank Nieuwe Theatermakersprijs, competition for most promising young theatre maker in Holland. The German magazine Tanz titled her as one of the most promising talents of 2017.

Her first feature film Craigslist Allstars had its premiere in 2016 at IDFA, world’s biggest festival for documentary, and was named by the press one the most exciting film at the festival. It was nominated in the main competition for best international films at CPH:DOX 2017. It won the “Spirit Of CUFF” prize in 2017 at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Elagoz’s work is very personal and at the same time close to important social and political debates of our times (sexual violence, male gaze, loneliness in digital age). The most indicative parts of her filmings are that she doesn’t use actors or performers, and that all subjects in her works are men. It bored her to see art history littered with the classical set up of male gaze, where woman is the passive object/muse of male artists, and so she decided to become a female artist portraying men. For the past few years she’s been building an extensive collection of first encounters arranged through various online platforms like Craigslist, Tinder and Chatroulette. It quickly became a research on the, often laughable, gender roles. Educated in performative arts, she incorporates aspects of this medium with that of video and film, creating her own unique brand of “docu-fiction”.