07 Oct Trisha Ziff Uses Film and Photography to Call for Peace
Trisha Ziff has always been passionate about using the arts to help people have a voice and find peace amid conflict.
Whether it was creating community darkrooms in the 1970s or making documentary films, Ziff has used her talents to bring awareness to important topics.
Ziff is the founder of 212BERLIN, an independent film company that supports cultural collaborations, co-productions, visual arts projects and the production of touring exhibitions. She lives between Los Angeles and Mexico City and teaches film and media studies and guest lectures at various universities in the U.S., Mexico and Europe on film, curatorial studies, and media studies.
She has received numerous awards for her films, including the 2025 Free Speech Award for her documentary on Gerry Adams, a former Irish Republican politician who was the president of the Sinn Féin political party.
She met Adams in 1981 and still considers him a friend today. The work she did on her documentary Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man had a profound impact on her. “Making the film on Gerry was very much revisiting a part of who I am as much as it was his narrative,” she said.
The film also struck a chord with the youth in Ireland. After the film began screening, young people would come up to her and want to talk about the ideas in the film. “That to me was the best moment in the whole process of making this film. These people didn’t grow up in the north or grow up during conflict but they connected in some way with the issues. It resonated with them and had relevance to their lives. As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that,” she said.
Ziff’s film about Adams has been accepted in multiple film festivals. She said she feels it has a place in festivals like the Free Speech Film Festival that are committed to ideas, education and human rights. She said the film is particularly needed at this time in our world because it details how people turned away from violence and came together to talk to solve their problems.
“People came up with potential solutions that would take their communities to a different place and a better quality of life for everybody. You had to listen to ideas that weren’t your own ideas in order to have the quality of life that you wanted,” she said. “I think that’s an essential example for the world that we’re in today and that’s why the film is important. That it gets shown in those kinds of festivals matters most.”
As with many independent filmmakers, Ziff had a unique path to become an award-winning writer, director, photographer and curator. She was born in Leeds, England, and graduated from Canterbury College of Art in 1974 with a Pre-Diploma in Fine Arts. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts with Honours degree from the University of London–Goldsmiths College in 1977, Ziff started her career as a curator and worked in community arts as a cultural activist.
Following college, she became interested in the community arts movement of the late 1970s and worked at a community arts project called Camerawork, which set up community darkrooms that helped people document their own community. After establishing the darkroom in England, Ziff relocated to Northern Ireland to establish Camerawork Derry in 1981.
Ziff said these darkrooms gave people the resources to tell their own stories. “I worked with young people so that they would tell their own stories in the moments after the dominant media went home after the big events. They would leave and life would continue and I wanted to support young people telling that narrative, the quotidian realities of living under occupation in the north,” she said.
The “big events” that Ziff mentioned were part of The Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted for about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. For Ziff, what she witnessed helped lead her to a life of political activism.
“The experience of living in Derry in the Bogside as a community artist at that time had a huge impact on me. I was English and Jewish with no family history relating me to Ireland, just a sense of the huge injustice one witnessed on the news – which led to extreme solutions,” she said.
Despite all the strife in the country, Ziff felt very accepted by the people of Ireland and it became a pivotal time in her life. “The people treated me very well. I was invited into people’s homes and it felt like a family. Those years really changed me as a human being and they have never left me,” she said.
Although she only intended to stay for a year, Ziff ended up living in Ireland until 1986. Later, she moved to Mexico City and began her curatorial work. To date, her exhibitions have been seen at major international museums including Victoria & Albert Museum in London, International Center for Photography in New York, and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. She is a Guggenheim scholar and has received many awards in the U.S., England and Mexico.
Ziff’s film career began in 1994 when she served as a writer/producer on a documentary but her directorial debut came in 2008 when she co-directed and produced a documentary called Chevolution, which was based on an exhibition she curated that looked at the famous photographs of Che Guevara. It was that experience that got her hooked on filmmaking.
“I loved the collective element of filmmaking and have not looked back,” she said. Today, she continues to work with the same small crew on all of her films and incorporates her background in still photography into her work.
Join Us for the 2025 Free Speech Award Ceremony
Celebrate FREE SPEECH + PEACE with the Award-Winning Director of Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man:
When: Wednesday, November 12th, 5-7 PM
Where: The Philadelphia Club in Center City, Philadelphia
The event includes a gourmet reception, a multimedia presentation, and a panel discussion with Director Trisha Ziff led by American INSIGHT Board Member, Karen Curry.
All ticket holders will receive exclusive, complimentary access to watch all six 2025 Free Speech Award-winning films for FREE during the month of November.
Seating is limited and tickets must be purchased in advance on a first-come, first-served basis. No tickets will be sold at the door.
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