A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video, Daïchi Saïto is a Japanese-born film artist whose award-winning works 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 films explore the relationship between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the material nature of the medium, 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 for his films.
Saïto’s work has been widely exhibited in film festivals, museums, galleries, and cinematheques worldwide, including Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), George Eastman Museum (Rochester), the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles), BAM (Brooklyn), International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, the New York Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival's Wavelengths, among others. His solo shows have been presented at venues 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), Northwest Film Forum (Seattle), the Slovenian Cinematheque (Ljubljana), and the Norwegian Film Institute (Oslo).
In 2016, Saïto’s film Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (Jury Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival 2010; Best of the Festival Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2010) was named one of the “150 Essential Works in Canadian Cinema History” by the Toronto International Film Festival. He received a Tiger Award for Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam for Engram of Returning (Best Experimental Film Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2016; Best Experimental Documentary Award, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 2016). In Film Comment’s “Best of the Decade: Avant-Garde” 2010 poll, 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 2021 film earthearthearth has screened over two dozen international festivals and was featured in Artforum and the inaugural issue of MUBI Notebook Magazine.
His films are held in the 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, and they are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), the CFMDC (Toronto) and Arsenal (Berlin). 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.