SOLLERS POINT is a feature film about one man's return to society after a period of incarceration and six months' home detention. As Keith, 26, reenters a community scarred by joblessness, drugs and deeply entrenched segregation, he pushes back against limitations, some endemic to his socioeconomic reality, others self-imposed. This film was made possible, in part, with grants from the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) and Creative Capital. It was distributed in the US by Oscilloscope Laboratories in May, 2018.

Porterfield's first film, HAMILTON, made over the course of six years and released in 2006, chronicles two summer days in the life of a young family living in a diverse suburban neighborhood in northeast Baltimore City. It was shot and exhibited on 16mm and features an ensemble cast of high school actors from Baltimore School for the Arts, Patapsco, Patterson, and Chesapeake. Called "one of the finest American independent films ever made" by New Yorker film editor Richard Brody, it continues to tour festivals, museums, and universities around the world and was included in John Water's 2006 Top Ten in Artforum International. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Harvard Film Archive acquired it for their permanent collections in 2013.

Porterfield's second film was made from a 5-page scenario rather than a screenplay. It combined techniques of documentary and fiction and allowed for more improvisation from the non-professional cast. According to the Maryland Film Festival program notes, "the film's central thread comes from a group of friends and family preparing for the wake of Cory, a Baltimore man whose life was taken by a heroin overdose. As characters reconnect and mourn, many are interviewed by an off-screen voice about who they are and how they live, bringing the narrative into points of intersection with documentary and experimental film. Skate parks, living-room tattoo parlors, paint-gun melees, and karaoke bars provide the visually stunning backdrop for a chorus of scarred but dignified voices calling out for better lives. As with HAMILTON, neighborhood is another integral thread, weaving us through uniquely Baltimorean rural spaces on the edges of our urban experience."

Made possible with a grant from IFP and Panasonic, shot for $18K, PUTTY HILL premiered at the 2010 International Forum of New Cinema in Berlin. It won "Best Picture" at the Santiago Festival Internacional de Cine, the Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon, the Festivala Autorskog Filma in Belgrade and the Atlanta Film Festival, as well as the Cinema Eye Honors Award for Nonfiction Filmmaking from The Museum of the Moving Image and Filmmaker Magazine. In 2012, PUTTY HILL was included in the Whitney Biennial. MoMA acquired the film for its permanent collection in 2013.

When Taryn, a Northern Irish runaway, loses her job in Ocean City, MD, she seeks refuge with American relatives in Baltimore. What follows is a lo-fi musical about people finding each other, letting each other go, looking for love where they've found it before, and figuring out where they might find it next. Co-written by Amy Belk, my third film stars Kim Taylor, Ned Oldham, Deragh Campbell, Hannah Gross, Geoff Grace, Nick Petr, and Jack Carneal, and features original music by Dustin Wong, The Entrance Band, and Dope Body. It was shot in Baltimore and Ocean City in the summer of 2011 and premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

A character study as well as a meditation on communication, creativity, and physical space, TAKE WHAT YOU CAN CARRY is a picture of a young woman seen through the interiors she occupies and the company she keeps. My first film made away from home, TAKE WHAT YOU CAN CARRY is my most personal and formally playful work yet. Inspired by George Perec’s text Species of Spaces, it imagines a character in transition, living in a foreign city for an indeterminate amount of time, trying to balance the various and distinct public and private manifestations of her personality. The film was funded through a grant from The Wexner Center for the Arts and a fellowship from the Harvard Film Study Center. It was written and produced in three months and premiered in the Shorts Competition at the 2015 Berlinale.

This video, a component of an installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art for the 2011 Janet & Walter Sondheim Award exhibition, is a study of the photographic image as a unit of montage. It is made up of cell phone pictures alternating at 24 frames-per-second. The rapidity of the edit exploits the phenomenon of persistence of vision, creating the impression of overlap and suggesting associations, relationships, between the images: graphic, emotional, rhythmic, and thematic.

Developed as a thesis project at NYU, SAVE THE PLANET imagined a utopian group home in Bushwick, NY. Collaborating with homeless youth he met while living in Manhattan's Covenant House and inspired by the terrain of this Brooklyn neighborhood, Porterfield wrote a short screenplay about a diverse, makeshift family undergoing a change as they prepare for the departure of their surrogate father.

A silent, color Super 8mm sketch of a trip to Coney Island mid-summer, edited in-camera. Part of a collection of short films included in the Baltimore Museum of Art's 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Finalists' exhibition. For this film, Porterfield traveled with a friend on the Q train to New York City's most-historic beach. Inspired by the personal diary films of Jonas Mekas, it was crafted chronologically and edited in the moment through careful shot selection and improvised montage.

A music video commissioned by Baltimore's most brutal band, Dope Body, for the song "Enemy Outta Me" off the album "Nupping". Shot on Super 8 and 16mm at the Current Gallery basement, the video's visceral, lo-fi style was an attempt to capture the energy and raw power of the band's live sound.