Elsa Brès is an artist and filmmaker, living and working in the Cévennes (France). She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.

She develops long-term, research-based projects through a hybrid and collaborative practice that spans film and installation. Rooted in fieldwork, her approach explores how landscapes are shaped by ecological and political histories of exploitation, property, and resistance, as well as by non-human life. Blending observation, narratives, and visual experimentations, she creates poetic yet critical visions of coexistence between species, communities, and environments.

After three films revolving around alternative narratives about water-related infrastructure projects (Stella50.4N1.5E – 2016, 15min; Love Canal – 2017, 17min; Sweat – 2020, 30min), she premiered in 2025 Les Sanglières (She Boars), her first feature-film, set in the rural French region where she lives that deals with wild boars as allies of struggle. In 2026, she starts a new long-term project, A History of Holes, which explores underground worlds and their potential as spaces of organization and collective emancipation throughout history.

Her recent solo presentations include: La Loge Brussels (Connivéncia, 2023), State of Concept Athens (Notes for les Sanglières, 2022), transmediale Berlin (remote.response.request II, 2021- duo show with Maud Craigie. Her recent and up-coming exhibitions and screenings include: Fondation Pernod Ricard, Radius CCA, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, DMZdocs Korea, La Capella Barcelona, transmediale, Vdrome, Cincinnati Contemporary art center, MO.CO Panacée, FID Marseille, CRAC Occitanie, LOOP Barcelona, Palais de Tokyo.

She is the laureate of Bétonsalon/ADAGP grant in partnership with Kandinsky Library – Centre Pompidou in 2026, of the Sciences-Po Award for contemporary art in 2024 and Art Situacions prize in 2022. 

She is an active member of Elinka films production collective, Forêts Queer screening sessions and Coudoulous space for cinema.