Lendl's profile
Lendl Tellington is a filmmaker and visual artist who tinkers with time like music—remixing the line between prescribed histories and collective memory. Working across cinema, photography, and installation, he illuminates the ingenious ways communities forge their own systems of value beyond institutional recognition. His practice refuses to separate fiction from non-fiction, deploying each to expose what the other conceals.
Using only equipment essential to the narrative, Tellington transforms traditional power dynamics by creating intimate spaces where those in front of his lens become collaborators in shaping their own representation. The resulting images achieve a seamless grandeur—everyday gestures carry inherited wisdom, mundane spaces transform into sites of profound meaning.
Recent projects include "...that's Why He Made Momma," a feature documentary and exhibition examining how his own family reimagines legacy beyond property ownership, created with his sister at Creative Alliance (2020-2023). Currently, he is co-directing a film about Younousse Seye, Senegal's first woman contemporary artist, which interrogates how cultural memory governs the remembrance of Black women artists.
For a decade, Tellington has served as Technical Producer for BlackStar Film Festival while maintaining an active artistic practice recognized by the Smithsonian's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and Creative Capital and supported by Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, Bay Area Video Coalition.
Through collaborative processes that honor both subject and community, Tellington demonstrates that preservation itself is resistance—creating visual documents that feel simultaneously like family albums and historical records, inspiring communities to claim narrative ownership when other forms remain elusive.
