About Onion City

The Onion City Experimental Film Festival is one of the premiere international festivals exclusively devoted to experimental film and video. Our mission is to provide local and regional audiences with an opportunity to view a wide variety of contemporary experimental works, focused on artistic excellence, but also with an eye towards representing differing styles, forms, and nationalities.

Onion City is a production of Chicago Filmmakers, a media arts non-profit that provides education, film exhibition and resources for filmmakers and film lovers.

Festival Team

Nicky Ni & Elise Schierbeek: Onion City Programmers
Brenda Webb: Executive Director
Robin Woitesek: Programs & Festival Manager

Tanner Masseth: Trailer & Festival Bumpers

Meet Our Festival Programmers!

Nicky Ni (she/her) is a Chinese expat living and working between Chicago and Beijing. She has been a programmer for the Onion City Experimental Film Festival since the fall of 2022. Beyond Onion City, she works as Assistant Editor at Newcity and Distribution Assistant at the Video Data Bank. She regularly contributes to Portable Gray, Chicago Reader, and Cine-File, and has completed curatorial projects at Conversations at the Edge, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Mana Contemporary, Arts Club of Chicago, Lit & Luz Festival (Chicago/Mexico City), among other venues. She is also a selection committee member for London Short Film Festival. She has done residencies at Chicago Artists Coalition (2022-23); at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture (Online/Utrecht, NL, 2021); and Momus (Online/Canada, 2020). She co-founded LITHIUM, an alternative space dedicated to time-based art (2017-2020). Nicky graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern.

Elise Schierbeek (they/she) is a writer, media archivist, and film programmer living in Chicago. Day to day, Elise works as the Digital Collection and Media Manager at Video Data Bank, overseeing digital access, media production, and all things web. For many formative years, they worked in archives and distribution at Kartemquin Films and the Flaxman Library 16mm Film Study Collection. Elise has served as a juror for the Milwaukee Film Festival, ExTV’s ExFest, and Kartemquin’s Hulu Accelerator Program, and as a co-producer of Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival in 2024. Elise is a regular contributor to Cine-File, co-runs the itinerant film curatorial project Employees Only, and volunteers as a mentorship advisor for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. They are currently undertaking an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and hold a BFA in Film, Video, New Media and Animation from the same.