Michaela Cullen is an Irish artist and filmmaker based in London. Working across experimental film, photography, sound, writing, and sculptural installation, she creates immersive, emotionally driven works that blur the boundaries between fiction, folklore, memory, and lived experience.

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Her practice explores how individuals and communities construct meaning within fragmented social and cultural conditions. Drawing on critical theory, folklore, landscape, and everyday experience, she examines how identity, belonging, memory, and desire are shaped by collective histories, inherited narratives, and contemporary systems of power. Her work is concerned with how people navigate uncertainty and seek connection amid rapid social change, precarity, and alienation.

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Current research engages with planetary anxiety, the Anthropocene, horticulture, foraging, body horror, and speculative thinking. Grounded in a longstanding interest in Irish and Celtic mythology and storytelling traditions, her work uses non-linear and folkloric narratives to explore ecological collapse, technological acceleration, social fragmentation, and alternative futures. 

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Influenced by thinkers including Zygmunt Bauman, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Joanna Zylinska, Cullen investigates the tensions between individual agency and the social, cultural, and material forces that shape contemporary life. Recurring themes include myth-making, ritual, place, intimacy, collective memory, and the traces of history within the present. Folklore and horror function not as nostalgia, but as tools for exploring contemporary anxieties and contradictions.

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Material experimentation is central to her practice. Working with organic matter, found objects, moving image, and sound, she creates hybrid forms that feel both ancient and speculative. Landscapes, fungi, plant matter, and material residues become sites through which questions of ecology, embodiment, technology, and belief can be explored.

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Her process is research-led yet intuitive. Films emerge through non-linear editing, where fragments, atmospheres, and associations are assembled to uncover emotional and conceptual connections. Sculptural works often operate as narrative artefacts—props, relics, or traces from imagined worlds.

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Cullen's practice is also shaped by her experience of neurodivergence, particularly autism and ADHD, informing her approach to attention, pattern recognition, sensory perception, and systems thinking. These perspectives underpin her methodology across film, sound, writing, and installation.

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Across her work, Cullen explores how meaning is constructed in conditions of uncertainty. By tracing connections between ecology, technology, mythology, memory, and the body, she creates immersive experiences that invite reflection on how we understand ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit.