Marcelese Cooper
Directing
Biography
Marcelese Cooper is an artist, filmmaker, and educator originally from Santa Clarita, California. Their work moves between animation, documentary, and experimental video, often exploring identity, community, and Black narrative through collaborative storytelling. Drawing influence from dream logic, science fiction, and surreal art house cinema, Cooper’s films frequently combine speculative imagery with documentary impulses. Cooper is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Their recent work includes community-centered animation and hybrid documentary projects that bring together multiple artists to translate personal and collective stories into moving image.
Known For
Upon the listing an ad seeking video submissions that discussed one's personal relationship with alcohol, a random collection of people sat down reflect. These intimate thoughts were then projected on to settings and spaces in connection to my own relationship, thinking back to when I could drink. Together we sit and meditate on the tricky nature of an easy to rely on a substance.
Alcohol Diaries
Story Drive: Voices Unveiled is a hybrid-documentary that showcases real-life anonymous LGBTQIA+ voicemails and adapts them into a cinematic experience contrasting personal, raw, and at times emotional testimonies with otherworldly, whimsical, and experimental animation.
Story Drive: Voices Unveiled
Blending candid interviews, experimental moments, and reflective narration, this 55-minute personal doc explores what it means to grow up when the people who love you also struggle to accept who you are. Through screen-recorded calls with friends, street interviews, and distant footage of everyday life, I examine my upbringing as a queer non-binary trans person—where love, expectation, and shame often coexisted—among a sea of other stories about adolescence. Anchored by a conversation with a close friend and fellow artist, the film sits in the tension between care and rejection, asking if anyone is even really special—or maybe all of us are.
NO MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE
A diary piece reflecting on the time, community, love, and anxiety...oh and also Dominican food.
THE VERY FIRST TIME
These are some thoughts,what could be described as an honest reflection of a moment in my life that seems to stretch and stretch but never fully end. Presented in animated form for the sake of not dwelling on this reality more than one has to already.
These Are Some Thoughts
In this music video for the electric punk infused shoegaze act CowBoyGirl, we follow a young zombie loner crumbling under the weight of social anxiety and watch him leave a party of humans to go grab a drink alone or fingers crossed a blunt and decent undead company.
Rolling Paperz
STORY DRIVE Entry #011 - A teen receives a cosmic gift and decides to keep on giving.
SMOKES
STORY DRIVE Entry #007 - A man recounts a wild goose chase in Winnie, TX.
Out Near Winnie
A space and time just beyond our dreams but never beyond the waves, "THESE DAYS ARE LONG" is an experimental piece that sits between that of a documentary and a poem constructed of memories of the pre/early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (within Houston, TX). These days are long and our memories of them are ephemeral.