Wrik Mead has been making experimental queer animated films for over 35 years, building a deeply personal and defiantly imaginative body of work that spans more than 50 films. Rooted in the psychodramatic, his films explore queer fantasy, desire, dreams, and the unstable terrain between the personal and the political. Through frame-by-frame manipulations and fractured narratives, he explores queer embodiment, loss, eroticism, and the unconscious, offering viewers an invitation into a world where nothing is fixed and everything is in motion. Whether through intimate documentary or surreal animation, his work resists convention—alternately offering a cinema of feeling, fragmentation, and transformation. His work defies easy categorization, instead carving out space for queer longing in all its complexity and contradiction.
A graduate of the Ontario College of Art (1988, with Honours), he later earned his MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London (2004). His films have been Internationally exhibited and celebrated for their vulnerability, sensuality, and raw visual language—charting a queer lineage that is as much about survival as it is about invention.
He lives and works in Toronto and teaches at OCAD University, continuing to shape and be shaped by the evolving landscape of queer experimental film.
HomoEroticus: The Films of Wrik Mead (PDF)
CFMDC Spotlight Series: Study Guide
Wrik Mead-Draw the Line by Mark Waugh (pdf)
Wrik Mead: Local Hero Programme (pdf)
