Roz Mortimer is a British artist and filmmaker who lives and works between London and Mexico.
Her work draws on phenomenological interpretations of trauma and spectrality through an engagement with fabulation, performance and the tableau vivant. She has worked extensively with marginalized communities, such as Inuit mothers in the High Arctic (Invisible, 2006), intersex people in the UK (Gender Trouble, 2002), Holocaust witnesses in rural Poland (This is History, 2014) and Roma families in Europe (The Deathless Woman, 2019) to develop moving image works that operate as catalysts for social change.
Roz originally trained as a textile artist, exhibiting mixed media installations in the UK and Europe before expanding her practice to include film, photography, sound, performance and writing. She began working with moving image in 1995 and since then her award-winning films have been exhibited widely around the world in cinemas, museums, galleries, film festivals, online and on television.
Roz has an MA in Visual Sociology (Goldsmiths, University of London), a PhD in Hybrid Documentary Film (CREAM, University of Westminster), and has lectured at universities in the UK and USA. Her work has been commissioned and supported by Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, British Council, Film London Artist’s Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Animate Projects and Channel 4 Television.
Roz’s most recent work has been focused on exploring how the spectral can be used to articulate trauma and to critically re-evaluate society and our position within it. Linked to this she is the founder of a non-hierarchal research group, Spectral Cinema & Contested Landscapes whose outcomes have been symposiums in 2022 and 2025, and a special issue of the Moving Image Review & Arts Journal (MIRAJ) in 2023. Between 2011 and 2022 she worked closely with the Roma community in the UK and Europe – work that cumulated in her award-winning feature The Deathless Woman which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival and formed the centrepiece of a UK-wide community cohesion tour designed to confront the persecution and prejudice many Roma face in their day to day lives.
Roz’s work is produced by Wonderdog Films.