Niles Atallah is a Chilean–United States visual artist, filmmaker and educator of the Palestinian diaspora, based in Santiago, Chile. His practice moves between cinema, animation, photography, installation, sound and performance with a sustained interest in material processes, archives and the unstable boundary between documentary evidence, fiction and imagination. He works across writing, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, art direction, sound design, image post-production and color, combining artisanal techniques—puppetry, mask-making, rotoscopy, wet-plate collodion photography and the physical manipulation of celluloid—with digital, 3D, XR and emerging technologies.
Atallah’s feature films include Lucía (2010), Rey (2017) and Animalia Paradoxa (2024). Lucía premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and later received the FIPRESCI Prize, the French Critics’ Discovery Prize and a Special Jury award at Cinélatino in Toulouse; Atallah also received Best Director at the Valdivia International Film Festival. Rey premiered in Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition, where it received the Special Jury Award “for an exceptional artistic achievement,” and later won Best Film at Cinélatino Toulouse. Merrimundi (2025) had its world premiere in the Orizzonti International Short Film Competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
His moving-image work is inseparable from his visual-art practice. With Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León he co-created the animated shorts Lucía and Luis, developed through room-sized installations and material animation. Luis was selected from more than 23,000 submissions for YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as one of the Top 25 videos. Their work has also appeared in the 7th Mercosul Biennial, Beijing 798 Art Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, Kunsthaus Zürich and Fundación PROA. Recent exhibitions include Merrimundi Immersive at Omni Soundlab and Aqua Vitae at Casa Fósfora.
In 2007 Atallah co-founded Diluvio with Cociña and León, establishing a long-running platform for experimental animation, feature filmmaking, music video, installation and image post-production in Chile. He was an executive producer, cinematographer, animator for one sequence, image post-production artist and colorist on León and Cociña’s La casa lobo / The Wolf House (2018), winner of the Caligari Film Prize at the Berlinale. Rotten Tomatoes places the film at No. 8 in its guide to the “52 Best Stop-Motion Animated Movies of All Time,” calling it “a stunning outpouring of creativity.” In 2026 Atallah founded Fósfora / Casa Fósfora, a production company and creative studio bringing together a film laboratory, animation studio, image post-production facilities, workshops and exhibition activity.
Atallah’s collaborative work extends beyond production companies. He was a member of the collective Ojo Chile during the 2019 social uprising, and founded the animation workshop, developing collective handmade animation as a creative response to images of state violence, and is also a member of Cineastas x Palestina. These collectives reflect his broader approach to cinema as a shared artistic and social process rather than a fixed industrial model.
Teaching and mentorship form a substantial part of his practice. He has taught filmmaking, experimental cinema, animation, cinematography and audiovisual creation at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales, Universidad de Chile, Universidad del Desarrollo and ARCOS, with visiting teaching at Harvard University. His work spans undergraduate and master’s-level education, thesis supervision and curriculum design. He has also led independent workshops and laboratories in Chile and abroad on experimental filmmaking, rotoscopy, 16mm and 35mm material intervention, collective creation and project development at institutions and festivals including the Cineteca Nacional de Chile, FECICOM, Centro de Cine y Creación and Corrientes de No Ficción in Arequipa, Perú.
He is frequently invited as a speaker, panelist, mentor and project evaluator, addressing archives and the ecology of images, dystopia and apocalypses, fiction and truth, materiality, animation, artificial intelligence and experimental cinema. He has served on international festival juries, evaluated development projects for the Hubert Bals Fund, and worked as a script consultant and project mentor. His writings have appeared in books, magazines and commissioned festival publications, while his films and artistic practice have generated extensive criticism, interviews and academic scholarship internationally.
His films and projects have received support from a wide range of international and Chilean film funds, including the Hubert Bals Fund, Global Film Initiative, Fondo de Fomento Audiovisual, CORFO, CNC – Aide aux cinémas du monde, NRW Film Fund, Doha Film Institute, TorinoFilmLab, and FONDART. Niles has also taken part in major development and residency programmes including Binger FilmLab’s Writer’s Lab, TorinoFilmLab Script & Pitch and Framework, Cinéfondation L’Atelier at Cannes, Pavillon Les Cinémas du Monde, Australab, Cinéma en Développement, SANFIC Industria / Santiago LAB, MAFF at the Málaga Film Festival, Mediamorfosis / LAB XR, and IDFA DocLab Forum. These programmes have supported projects across script development, production, post-production, distribution, immersive media and artistic research.