A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video, Daïchi Saïto is a Japanese-born film artist whose award-winning films include Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009) and Engram of Returning (2015). Saïto divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and Montréal, where he co-founded the artist film collective Double Negative in 2004. His work explores the relationship between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the materiality of film, fusing formal investigations of frame and juxtaposition with sensual, poetic expressions.
Drawn to exploratory processes involving structured improvisation, Saïto has frequently collaborated with composer-improvisers such as Malcolm Goldstein and Jason Sharp. His films have been presented in museums, galleries, cinematheques, and major international festivals worldwide, including Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles), International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, the New York Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival's Wavelengths program, among others.
Saïto’s solo shows have been hosted by institutions such as M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Documenta Madrid (Madrid), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Image Forum (Tokyo), Anthology Film Archives (New York), BAFICI (Buenos Aires), CCCB (Barcelona), the Slovenian Cinematheque (Ljubljana), and the Norwegian Film Institute (Oslo). Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis—recipient of the Jury Grand Prize at Media City Film Festival and Best of the Festival Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (2010)—was named one of the "150 Essential Works in Canadian Cinema History" by the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. Engram of Returning won multiple international honors, including the Tiger Award for Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Best Experimental Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Best Experimental Documentary Award at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2016). In Film Comment ’s “Best of the Decade: Avant-Garde” poll in 2010, Saïto ranked third among the “25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century,” and in 2020 Film Comment cited Engram of Returning as one of the “10 key moving image works of the decade (2010-2019).”
His critically acclaimed film, earthearthearth (2021), has screened in two dozen international festivals and was featured in Artforum and the inaugural issue of MUBI Notebook Magazine. Saïto’s films are held in the permanent collections of the Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), the Slovenian Cinematheque (Ljubljana), and the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. They are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), Arsenal (Berlin), and the CFMDC (Toronto).
His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Office national du film du Canada, PRIM, DAÏMÔN, and Media City Film Festival. Before joining Ithaca College, Saïto taught at Binghamton University (SUNY), NSCAD University in Halifax, Concordia University in Montréal and the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV de San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV) in Cuba.
- MFA in Studio Arts, Concordia University
- BFA in Film Production, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University
Moving the Sleeping Images of Things Towards the Light, Montréal: Éditions Le laps, 2013.