Baker Artist Portfolios

Marnie Ellen Hertzler (she/they)  is a Baltimore-based filmmaker from rural Virginia whose work arises from long-term field research and sustained relationships with the places and people she films. She works primarily in documentary and hybrid cinema, exploring how time, labor, and ecological change shape the lives of communities living through transition.

Her first feature documentary, Crestone, examines isolation and speculative futurity within a remote desert community. Her current feature, Eternity One, grows out of six years of work on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. The film traces disappearance, endurance, and the lived experience of environmental precarity, attending to how personal, historical, and geological timescales intersect in daily life.

Hertzler approaches filmmaking as an immersive process grounded in patience, collaboration, and presence. Her projects develop over many years, privileging lived time over extraction or spectacle and emphasizing responsibility to the people and places represented on screen.

Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund, Rooftop Film Fund, and the Rubys Artist Grant. She has held residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. Her films have screened at venues and festivals including Locarno Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, MoMA, The Criterion Channel, SXSW, and CPH:DOX. She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University.