The Writer That Kills Bad People, an interview with Erika Balsom

Erika Balsom grew up in small town Canada, graduated from Brown University in Providence and works as a professor at King's College London. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. That same year she published An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea as part of a residency and exhibition she curated at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre in New Zealand. This "little book", which anticipated her current publishing project, was translated into Korean and republished in 2024.

Balsom's impact on contemporary moving image art is formidable. She is influential as an academic, closely-watched (and read) as a writer and adventurous as a curator. Her most tenured engagement – besides her professorship – is as a member of the film club and curatorial collective The Machine That Kills Bad People, which organizes bi-monthly screenings at Institute of Contemporary Arts London since 2018. Her cultural breakthrough came in 2022 when she co-curated the ambitious group show No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image with Hila Peleg at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The screen program for that exhibition is still traveling the world in various iterations, to be presented next at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2026.

Balsom will also continue this exhibition in the form of a research project on an Italian women's film collective that was active in the 1970s and 1980s. We spoke to her about the lasting impact of No Master Territories, about Cutaways, the new pocket book series she is co-editing, and about her thoughts on writing and editing in general.