Ester Bergsmark

Ester M. Bergsmark is an artist, filmmaker and artistic researcher from Stockholm. She grew up near a landfill. That place with large overgrown hills overlooking the entire city was a nourishing sanctuary beyond binary divisions between city and nature. In Bergsmark's artistic thesis voice under she listens to strange resonances with jellyfish, invertebrates and animals considered alien to humans, in a kind of transfeminine sensibility where the tactile lived, beautiful and ugly are dissolved, with a strong eriotic curiosity to find playful ways out of deadlocks.

She is driven by the desire to explore how desire, joy and liberation can be a generating principle – in terms of inner, outer and collective change. Traumaturgy is a term Bergsmark has given her quest of developing dramaturgies with the capacity to depict the vulnerability of queer and trans people, without the fixation on humiliation or trauma. Instead, the aim is to approach the potential of vulnerability and uncertainty as liberating, transformative and pleasurable.

Högdalen landfill south of Stockholm.

voice under - performance film screening. My Wild Flag sep 2025. Photo Daniel Pehrson

Photo: Märta Thisner

Bergsmark works across genres and formats, often in close collaboration with other artists. Some of her most notable films are Something Must Break (2014)( Tiger Award Rotterdam IFF) and She Male Snails (2012), both in collaboration with Eli Levén, and Maggie vaknar på balkongen that was notably awarded with a Guldbagge for Best Documentary in 2008.

Her performative film screening voice under is a further development of Bergmark’s artistic research project within the PhD program Performative and Media-Based Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts, concluded in 2023.

Ester M Bergsmark is a visual artist and film director based in Stockholm, Sweden, working at the intersection between documentary, fiction and experimental film.
Their work is exhibited in cinemas and art galleries around the world. Ester also present their work at interdisciplinary and academic conferences. ( as
International Queer Death Studies Conference: Karlstad University, 2019 and at The 8th Nordic Trans Studies Conference, Tampere University, 2023.)

Their performative contemplative film works have been shown at Accelerator, Stockholm. EMAF, Osnabrück. Tensta Konsthall, Gorki Theater Berlin and Index Foundation, Stockholm.

In 2009 Ester took part in the widely debated Dirty Diaries project, produced by Mia Engberg, and has since been involved in several projects and panel discussions on the importance of finding new ways of depicting sexuality.
In 2014 Ester was bestowed the Mai Zetterling Award.

Ester is a graduate from the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. They co-directed with Mark Hammarberg and Maggie Beatriz Andersson the documentary feature Maggie in Wonderland (Honorable Mention at CPH:DOX 2008 and Guldbagge Award for Best Documentary 2009), and they later directed the documentary She Male Snails (2012). Ester’s debut fiction feature Something Must Break won the Tiger Award for Best Film at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014 and has been awarded at several international film festivals. It was released in the Nordic countries as well as in France, Spain, Germany and Poland, among others. Something Must Break is considered a global milestone in its authentic portrayal of non-binary/trans people, starring a stunning Saga Becker, the first trans actress to win various film awards in Sweden.

Bergsmark teaches regularly at Stockholm University of the Arts and has been a visiting guest teacher at the Konstfack university of arts and crafts Stockholm, the Royal Academy of Arts, Academy of Media Arts, KHM, Cologne, the Valand Academy of Arts, etc.