Elena Oxman

Elena Oxman was born in 1977, and is an American film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her directorial debut film Outerlands, which received the Queer Media Society award for being the best queer feature film screened at the 2025 Munich International Film Festival in Germany.

Career

Elena Oxman was born in New York City, but she predominantly grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her love for movie-making began at a young age in Connecticut after she inherited her father's 8mm camcorder and started making short films with it.

Oxman studied as an undergraduate student at Yale University where she experimented with making documentaries about New Haven and low-fi short films. After graduating from Yale University, Oxman was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship at Yale's Digital Media Center for the Arts. In 1999, during her fellowship, Oxman collaborated with Elihu Rubin to create a documentary collaborative that focuses on American landscapes, which they named American Beat. The documentary production company is most notably known for its "The New Haven Trilogy" which includes the films On Broadway, Convergence, and Next Question.

Oxman continued her education in film theory at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She published pieces of her dissertation on French film theory/criticism, and in 2012 she received her Ph.D. in English with a focus on film and phenomenology.

In 2011 Oxman moved to San Francisco to refocus her attention towards filmmaking. In 2014, she wrote and directed a narrative short film called Lit which she filmed at The Lexington Club in San Francisco. Lit premiered at the Palm Springs International Shortfest, and was screened at Frameline, Outfest, and other festivals in the country which helped Oxman gain exposure for her next film.

In 2018, Oxman was awarded the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) FilmHouse Residency to help her develop her first feature film, Outerlands. The film stars nonbinary actor, Asia Kate Dillon (as the protagonist, Cas), and utilizes themes of queerness, abuse, and confronting past traumas to represent a journey of self-acceptance. The film had its world premiere in 2025 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, and is highly praised for incorporating more than thirty-five different San Francisco locations into the film.

Outside of making films, Oxman also teaches film studies and filmmaking at various prestigious schools including; Duke University, Stanford University, College of San Mateo, The Harvey Milk Center for the Arts, Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Filmography

Documentary shorts

Year	Title	Director	Writer	Editor	Producer	Notes
2000	Curley's Vigil: Portrait of A Diner	No	No	No	Co-producer
2002	KMART Confidential	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
2002	Convergence and Other Rituals of the New Haven Green	Co-director	Co-writer	Co-editor	Co-producer
2002	On Broadway: A New Haven Streetscape	Co-director	Co-writer	Co-editor	Co-producer

Short films

Year	Title	Director	Writer	Editor	Notes
2014	Lit	Yes	Yes	No
2016	New Queer Visions: Lust in Translation	Yes (only Lit)	Yes (only Lit)	No	Compilation of short films: including Lit

Feature films

Year	Title	Director	Writer	Editor	Notes
2025	Outerlands	Yes	Yes	No	Directorial debut

Awards and nominations

Outerlands won the The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at Wicked Queer in Boston.

At the 2025 Munich International Film Festival, Outerlands became the first film to receive the Queer Media Society (QMS) Award for being the Best Queer Feature Film at the festival.

Outerlands receives the Torino Pride Award at the 2025 Lovers Film Festival.

At the 2025 Milwaukee Film Festival, Outerlands won the Emerging Fiction Jury Award.

At the 25th Annual Santa Cruz Film Festival, Outerlands won the Best Narrative Feature Jury Award.

Further reading

Articles

• Oxman, E. (2005). "A MORE LIBERAL MODE OF LIFE": Walter Pater and the Values Made Possible by Art. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 88(1/2), 71–89.

Books

• Oxman, E., & Flaxman, G. "Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema". Losing Face.

Theses and dissertations

• Oxman, E. (2010). Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual. SubStance 39(2), 71-90.

External links

• Elena Oxman on IMDb

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