Janelle VanderKelen, an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Time-Based Arts in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, has received a 2025 Creative Capital Award and grant for her work in progress. Her project, The Golden Thread, is a 16mm feature film that highlights ways unseen fungi help slow climate change and mitigate its effects.
The 2025 Creative Capital Awards in Visual Arts, Technology, Performing Arts, Film/Moving Image, and Literature represent 49 projects by 55 artists from all over the country. Creative Capital awarded innovative projects focused on painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, video, installation, dance, theater, jazz, opera, multimedia performance, narrative film, experimental film, documentary film, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
VanderKelen’s previous films have screened at festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, CROSSROADS, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Festival. Recent honors include include a 2023 Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship, a juried award at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival, and a 2023 MacDowell Residency.
From the Creative Capital announcement on The Golden Thread:
“This experimental documentary will be filmed in Germany near the home of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century abbess, proto-feminist scholar, composer, and self-taught naturalist. Her copious writings demonstrate a sophisticated understandings of more-than-human agency and continue to influence environmental dialogues nearly a millennia later. Hildegard’s life was also marked by numerous mystical visions, and her writings mention intriguing images of golden strands connecting all life.
The Golden Thread reimagines the connective threads from Hildegard’s visions as the glistening fungal mycorrhizae that recent scientific discoveries indicate are integral to interspecies plant collaboration, human agriculture, forest conservation, and carbon sequestration. Throughout the course of the film, animated sequences will make the agency of these golden fungal threads visible as they envelope the architecture of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, a religious community founded by Hildegard that is still active today.”
