Winners of Gjon Mili IVAF
The International Video Art Festival proudly announced the winners of its 3rd edition, held across three unique cultural landscapes: Korça, Dhërmi, and Manhattan. This year’s festival highlighted artists whose works redefine the language of moving image, blending experimental cinema, animation, performance, VR, and documentary.
The 2025 edition celebrated diversity not only in artistic media but also in geographical and cultural perspectives, bringing together voices from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Iran/UK, and Canada. Each of the winning works challenged audiences to confront urgent contemporary realities, while also expanding the possibilities of visual storytelling.
Best Video Art & Experimental
Eleni Mylonas (United States) – SeaMonster II (00:14:19)
Eleni Mylonas, a multidisciplinary artist based in both New York and Athens, was awarded Best Video Art & Experimental. A Fulbright scholar, she holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a degree in photography from the University of London. Throughout her career, Mylonas has exhibited widely, from MoMA PS1 in New York to the Benaki Museum in Athens, as well as galleries in Munich and international foundations in New York.
Her winning work, SeaMonster II, continues her acclaimed SeaMonster series. The project uses found objects collected along the shores of Aegina—nets, plastics, and discarded fragments of human life—which are transformed into elements of ritual and performance. In this way, Mylonas turns environmental debris into a poetic testimony on the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The piece follows the first iteration, SeaMonster Monk, presented at the Athens Art Fair (2019) and later at WhiteBox NYC (2023).
Read more →Best Animation Film
Aria Wolf (Germany) – Lichtung (00:15:00)
German artist Aria Wolf was recognized with the Best Animation Film award for her VR project Lichtung. Born in 1996, Wolf studied Transmedia Games Directing at the Animation Institute of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Media from Media University Stuttgart. Her earlier work includes the domestic violence prevention short YASEMIN (2021), the documentary ROSA (2021), and the atmospheric game experience Sanguine (2022).
Her latest project, Lichtung, offers audiences an immersive experience: a luminous world lying dormant until the viewer enters. As one explores its surroundings, the environment slowly awakens, revealing light and hidden wonders. Recently selected for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in the VR category, Lichtung exemplifies the evolving potential of animation when fused with virtual reality technologies.
Read more →Best Short Film
Bea de Visser (Netherlands) – No horses on Mars (00:14:54)
Dutch filmmaker and artist Bea de Visser was honored with the Best Short Film award for her work No horses on Mars. De Visser began her career in the early 1980s as a sound and performance artist in clubs and art spaces. She is recognized internationally for her film art, installation work, and sound performances, blending digital media with painterly, poetic storytelling. She also leads the independent studio Anotherfilm, lectures at the University of the Arts, and mentors young scenography students, while her work features in international collections and festivals worldwide.
No horses on Mars unfolds as a road film, but from a unique perspective: that of a horse. The narrative introduces viewers to the galloping mind of domesticated horses, reflecting on humanity’s attempts to measure, record, and know them as objects. Yet, through its cinematic language, the film suggests glimpses of individuality and recognition beyond domestication, questioning the relationship between human perception and the natural world.
Read more →Best Short Documentary
Parham Ghalamdar (Iran/UK) – The Sight is a Wound (00:06:48)
The Best Short Documentary award went to Parham Ghalamdar, an Iranian-born, UK-based multidisciplinary artist. Ghalamdar’s practice combines painting, film, and writing to explore speculative worlds where history, mythology, and futurism collapse into each other. He has received the UK New Artists Bursary (2023), an ACE Project Grant, and several innovative grants, with his work also included in the UK Government Art Collection.
His awarded work, The Sight is a Wound, is a haunting video-poem reflecting on the limits of image-making in the face of modern atrocity. In response to the genocide in Gaza, Ghalamdar set fire to over 50 of his own paintings—once exhibited in prestigious shows—turning them into ashes. This visceral act of destruction becomes a meditation on silence, despair, and the collapse of visual language in an age of digital excess and emotional numbness. The work is not a call to action, but an elegy for images themselves, questioning what remains when the visual world fails us.
Read more →Audience Choice Award
Brian R Donnelly (Canada) – Goin’ Down The Road (00:04:11)
The Audience Choice Award was presented to Canadian artist Brian R Donnelly for his project Goin’ Down The Road. Based in Toronto and holding a BFA in Painting from OCAD University, Donnelly has exhibited internationally since 2007 and began experimenting with video-based work in 2017. His practice often addresses themes of identity and distortion, building layered narratives from both painting and moving image.
Goin’ Down The Road is an ongoing project that reimagines Toronto through popular film fragments, archival materials, and contemporary wide-angle video. By layering cinematic inconsistencies, dialogue snippets, and fractured sequences, Donnelly creates a portrait of the city as both real and fictional. The work forms a document of Toronto’s cultural and urban evolution, distilling truth from an ever-growing archive of memory and make-believe.
Read more →A PLATFORM FOR BOLD NEW VOICES
This year’s International Video Art Festival reaffirmed its role as a global stage for artists who push boundaries and challenge audiences with daring works. From environmental performance to immersive VR animation, from poetic road films to video-poems confronting atrocity, and fractured urban portraits, the 2025 award winners demonstrate the vitality of video art as one of the most powerful languages of our time.