Raised in El Salvador and the United States, Mauricio Ancalmo works from a dual cultural perspective, drawing on cultural and personal themes such as circumstance, assimilation, and isolation. His work through sound and image is reminiscent of personal artifacts based on experience, striving to grasp individuality within the collective conscience. Mauricio Ancalmo has most recently worked with discarded objects such as sewing machines, word processors, 16mm film projectors and turntables as the principal characters in his theatre-sized installations. In these installations, such autonomous objects are introduced to 16mm film loops and intricately set up to interact with each other resulting in the production of camera-less films. The process comes from the idea of art that makes art, treating film as an ephemeral material, mixing it with performative elements, and residing in the realm of kinetic sculpture. Ancalmo received his MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, and his BFA in Computer Animation and Sculpture from the Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon. In the last years he had exhibitions in Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, SOMArts and Toronto Images Festival.