TEAM 2023
YAVUZ
FOUNDER & FESTIVAL DIRECTOR
Kurtulmus is founder of MiGaY, the first Austrian platform for LGBTIQA+ migrants, an organization that puts an emphasis on visibility and representation of queer minorities and POC. For more than 15 years he has been working as a political activist. In 2012, he founded Transition International Queer & Minorities Film Festival, Austria‘s only queer film happening with a focus on gender diversity and queer migrants. He promoted cooperative events with the Teddy Award of the Berlinale, the Oslo/Fusion Festival and the Wien Museum. Yavuz Kurtulmus is an experienced festival manager. He organized a lot of international film events and screenings. Furthermore, he gives lectures and workshops on queer muslim activism. As founder and director of the Porn Film Festival Vienna, he always wants to highlight the effects of sexuality, gender and diversity on our society.
JASMIN
CO-FOUNDER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Hagendorfer is a Vienna-based artist, creative mind, and writer. Her main artistic interest is installation, sculpture and performance, and her work has been exhibited in many countries. As an artist she is concerned with socio-political discourses and questions about gender identity with an emphasis on post-porn-politics. She is the co-founder of Art UnAnchored, an art festival that took place on a ship moving between Vienna and Bratislava. She holds workshops and presents lectures on feminist pornography and film/art, her latest talk can be seen on TEDX Vienna. At the moment she is mostly concerned with filmmaking. Her work as part of the Porn Film Festival Vienna is focusing on the overall creative concept of the festival, the creation of artistic highlights and maintaining an artistic balance in the festival programming.
ARDRINEH
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Adrineh Simonian comes from an Armenian family and has lived in Vienna since 1977. She first studied violin, piano, and vocal pedagogy at Vienna's University of Music and Performing Arts. Afterward, Adrineh finally graduated from the opera school of the Conservatory of the City of Vienna and graduated with distinction. After 15 years on the opera stages of the world, she decided to give up her profession to dedicate herself to the subject of pornography. She founded the company Arthouse Vienna and since then has been producing artistic and documentary porn films, all dealing with the psychology of sexuality. Since 2021 the website of Arthouse Vienna has become a streaming platform in the field of artistic and ethical porn, which has gained worldwide attention. Well-known and lesser-known filmmakers have the opportunity to exhibit their works to a broad audience.
JOHANNES
PROGRAMMER
Johannes Grenzfurthner manipulates people to positively respond to his lies and made-up realities, and he feeds off these emotions. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and performer. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film-production company. Boing Boing referred to him as a leitnerd, a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd/hacker/art culture. His last films were the feature-length documentaries Traceroute, (2016) and Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018) and the horror feature Masking Threshold (2021). He is head of Arse Elektronika, a sex and tech festival in San Francisco, and organizer of Roboexotica, the Festival for Cocktail-Robotics in Vienna.
ANNA
VOLUNTEER COORDINATION
A few years ago, when Anna first came into contact with the topics of body positivity and sex-positivity, she didn't quite understand the deeper meaning of those terms. Later, during her studies of theatre-, film- and media science in Vienna, she delved deeper into this topic, and the focus of her studies quickly shifted towards pornography, feminism, and gender. The rise of the sex-positive movement in the public space intensified her interest in this topic. Today, Anna is happy to be a member of this year's Porn Film Festival in Vienna.
BJANKA
FILMTRAFFIC
Bianka’s hometown is Chicago and her roots are in Bosnia. In Vienna since 2015, she’s working on projects with the goal of influencing people to buy local, sustainable fashion, support great art and initiatives and live life with love and intention. At a party or club, you can find her enthusiastically asking you for your Instagram so she can admire your creative projects. She got into the Porn Film Festival Vienna as a curious volunteer and stayed for the unique people and experiences. Last year, you might have seen her running around with the sweetest team of volunteers.
CHRISTINA
TEXT WRITER & EDITOR
Christina swings between film festivals and academia. Her research focuses on gender and visual culture, art and migration, and queer/feminist aesthetics and theory. She curated several film retrospectives and participated in different film festivals. In Christina's work on representations of sexuality in film, she crossed paths with the amazing team of Porn Film Festival Vienna. She has supported the festival as a writer and has contributed many texts ever since.
ALEPH
SIDE EVENT MANAGEMENT
Aleph is a sex-ed teacher based in Vienna and currently working on her Ph.D. as a university assistant in Gender & Sexuality Studies. She has graduated from the University of Vienna and the University of Amsterdam. Aleph joined Porn Film Festival Vienna in 2019 to take on the side events organization. She looks at porn from a feminist social science perspective and enjoys how porn can change our fantasies, be educative, and transform our sex.
DAMIEN
EVENT MANAGER
Damien is a well-known face of the LGBTIQ+ scene in Austria. Energetic performer, dancer, and dedicated member (sexwork and HIV activist) of the migrant sex group "Red Edition" in Vienna. A "mix of many different things" because there are so many different multifaceted faces to see in me. He is interested in foreign languages, communication science, travel, architecture, science fiction, and everything concerning pornography, fetish, and sex. Changing the society, addressing the politics, connecting sexwork with PFFV, exchanging ideas, and creating a liberal and cultural better tomorrow for all of us, through the festival like this, is a spectacular idea. Quote: "I am thrilled to be here and contribute to it with my experiences, knowledge, and sex... because I AM SEX."
VALENTINA
MODERATION
Valentina is a Gender Studies scholar living and working in Vienna. Among other things, she works for different film festivals in Vienna in production and curating and is interested in film and cinema's political and social dimensions. Working with Porn Film Festival Vienna, she combined her love for cinema with her interest in sexual politics, activism against gender inequality, and how both fields can be transformed and challenged in and through porn. Taking sex, sexualities, and desire out of their normative boxes and rearranging them in a way that feels good for every body, not just the heteronormative ones. But those too.
She works with Porn Film Festival Vienna since 2020, helped out with the programming, and did the volunteer management last year together with Bjanka. For this year's edition she's helping with the curation and organization of side events.
BIANCA
SUPPORT
Bianca is a graduate of film and media studies in Vienna, now working in cultural management, while also as a journalist. Passionate about digital marketing and PR, she collaborated with both national and international film festivals, living abroad in Greece and Italy, where she also contributed to the development of NGOs’. With a hunger for stories, for discovering the unseen, she dedicates energy to projects, which intend to open minds, being always prepared to move in a place so far and to expand ethnological, sociological and psychological knowledge, with a main goal of having the chance to create long-shorted lives in a complex of geographical contexts. Her first contact with Porn Film Festival was in 2021. As a volunteer, she was fascinated by the originality of the festival, by the impact it had on her comfort zone, on her creativity.