SPCUNY Artist

Anisa Hodzic

Student Fellow 2025-2026

Collaborators

Mirela Musić is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Montana and works at the intersection of identity and place. Her prizewinning chapbook, The Nature of Alaska, was published in 2024 by the Tusculum Review. She currently teaches high school English.
D. Nano (b. 2001, New York) is an emerging artist who explores expansive documentary and archival practices through image-making, filmmaking, collage, and community-oriented initiatives. Their work engages with themes of diaspora, queerness, and alternative forms of knowledge-making that embrace fluidity and resist rigid hierarchies. Their background as a first generation Albanian-American informs their thinking about memory, land, borders, and boundaries.
Bimbi (b. ????, Tirana, Albania) is an Albanian-American artist, writer, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. They play primarily with sound, sculpture, performance, and text, exploring identity, violence, belonging/displacement, gender/sexuality, mysticism, disability and disobedience. Under various pseudonyms, their work has been published in Montez Press Radio, Petit Mort, Currant Jam Magazine, SHOTA, Layout Magazine, No, Dear, and forthcoming in HNDL. They have performed at Performance Space New York, Pioneer Works, Recess Art, Text2Speech, the Slipper Room, and were a part of the 2025 Performa Biennal for Pakui Hardware’s Spores. They were an Emerge NYC Fellow in 2023.
Alissa Xhixhabesi is an Albanian-American filmmaker based in New York City who works primarily with analog formats, including 16mm, Super 8, and MiniDV. She is a recent graduate of the Media Studies program at The New School, where she focused on documentary storytelling, media archiving, and digital strategy. As cofounder of Reflex 72, she is committed to preserving the art of analog filmmaking and amplifying the voices of the next generation of filmmakers.
Edina Hoti (b. 1990, Sarajevo, Bosnia) is an artist, writer, and photographer based in Queens, NY. Hoti explores the contemporary cultural spaces left behind by the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her work focuses on Balkan communities in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Montenegro that have experienced war and genocide. While these communities have typically been represented through traumatic war narratives and a male lens, Hoti examines the nuanced space between everyday life and past memories through a feminist perspective.

Other Daughters: Voices from the Balkan Diaspora

Other Daughters is a curated program of short films exploring the intersections of heritage, gender, and the immigrant experience. Dxhesva Collective presents a cohort of Balkan-American filmmakers who utilize archival intervention, analog experimentation, and performance art to navigate the complexities of identity across generations. From the mountainous border towns of the former Yugoslavia to the basement corridors of New York City, these works interrogate how memory is preserved, how bodies rebel, and how “home” is reconstructed in the diaspora.

Featured Works & Filmmakers:

“Women in Gusinje” and “Koprive” by Anisa Hodzic: Hodzic’s work spans archival re-editing and visceral performance. Women in Gusinje deconstructs 1970s documentary footage to reclaim female narratives from the male gaze, while Koprive uses the stinging nettle as a tactile metaphor for the painful yet nurturing nature of maternal healing.

“Axilia” by Bimbi Mafia: A defiant act of self-adoration, this film challenges cultural taboos surrounding the female body, transforming “indecent” hair into a symbol of rebellion against societal expectations in Albania and beyond.

“Gjurma” (Traces) by Dora Nano: A poetic archival short that connects Nano to the origins of the Kinostudio, Albania’s first film studio. By weaving together documentary footage shot by their grandfather, audio interview with their father, and archival images, Nano explores the fluidity of diasporic and collective memory through cinema.

“Si Të Lashë” by Alissa Xhixhabesi: Documented on analog formats (16mm and Super 8), Xhixhabesi captures her grandparents’ home on the eve of demolition, offering a haunting meditation on the loss of physical space amidst Albania’s rapid modernization.

“Returning, Leaving” by Mirela Musić: An observational study of Balkan immigrant superintendents in NYC. The film documents the “disordered integration” of family life, focusing on the quiet gestures that define the space between a daughter’s arrival and a father’s departure.

“Scattered” by Edina Hoti: An ongoing series that explores the complex intersections of identity and displacement following the 1990s Balkan conflicts. Utilizing archival recordings of a return to Montenegro for the first time since the war, Hoti captures the reality of a “scattered family”—individuals bound by heart and ancestral stories despite being separated by borders and oceans. Her work examines the nuanced space between everyday life and past memories through a distinct feminist lens.