Samuel Stevens is an Artist Filmmaker, Photographer and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster where he completed a practice based PhD in 2016. His work moves between galleries and film festivals and has carved an international exhibition trail, participating in shows alongside seminal figures such as Harun Farocki and Martha Rosler, such as Lo Inconmensurable, Una Idea de Europa, CENTROCENTRO, Madrid (2016), Goodgangsters at the Taipei Museum of Fine Art (2008) and New Semantics at the Whitechapel, London (2006), as well as his solo exhibition WHY LOOK? at The Joinery, Dublin in 2011. Atlantopa (2009), that was funded by Film London and imagined a bridge across the straits of Gibraltar, won a Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan (2010) and was toured to various major UK locations including the Serpentine Gallery. Stevens also participated in the Lux Associate Artist Program.

Stevens' work originates primarly in landscape and the intertwining of historical, political and informational systems that define the present moment. Stephen Connolly has written on Samuel Stevens’ work on migration that they “reveal the boundaries and exclusions of the economic and legal frameworks of the EU, and how he; as artist making work, and we; as audience and witness to this work, are enmeshed in and compromised by these same socio-political frameworks.”

Stevens' current research project explores an archive of film and documents thought lost since the 1930s that uncovers the activities of the Film and Photo League a radical film group of filmmakers and photographers active in Britain in the 1930s. The project, a collaboration with the BFI was initiated and supported by the Arts Foundation following a Fellowship Award in 2017 and became a not-for-profit organisation, www.filmandphotoleaguearchive.org.uk, in 2019.

AFF judge Andrew Kotting commented “in Samuel Stevens’ work we found diversity and rigour and a spirit that probed and cajoled. The pacing was immaculate and the rhythms of sound-image correlation were seductive and informative."

Stevens' is also working on an ongoing Radical Media Archaeology research project that documents the oral histories of the Film and Video Workshop movement which will culminate in a film on the Newcastle based film and video workshop groupTrade Films that was intitiated with an event as part of a residency with Tyneside Cinema in 2018.