Berni*e Poikāne is a queer, Franco-Latvian video artist and filmmaker working between cinema and contemporary art, living and working between France and the Baltic region. Their filmic experiments unfold in a hybrid, immersive practice that blends the documentary and the fictional, staging representations of the gentle, the melancholy and the monstrous. Liminality is the recurring figure of both their artistic and theoretical work.

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Drawing on Baltic folklore, internet cultures, animism, diasporic memory and eco-queer fabulation, their work treats landscapes and bodies as something porous and inhabited — a place where dainas, dragonflies, werewolves, post-Soviet interiors, and queer bodies can share the same frame. The image is approached not as a window but as a shimmering, diffractive surface: something that bends, splits and re-makes what passes through it.

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Their film and sculptural project Vilkace (2023–2026), rooted in the Eastern Baltic, weaves the figure of the vilkace — the she-werewolf of Baltic lore — through diasporic and queer fabulation; it premiered in 2026 at Mains d'Œuvres (Saint-Ouen). Alongside their solo practice, they work with Murphy Yum under the duo Stand Alone Complex, with whom they co-presented the exhibition Nostalgie Artificielle at La Graineterie Art Center in 2025. Their practice spans film, video, sculpture and spatial installation, extended through research-creation and writing.

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Berni*e Poikāne studied at Villa Arson (Nice), the Weissensee School of Art (Berlin) and Université Grenoble Alpes. They are currently in residence at Villa Dufraine.