Mara Marxsen is a short film curator, distributor, and researcher. She works for the Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg and has curated several special programs for international short film festivals on topics such as disco, pleasure, punk, and sex work. Mara studied “Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image” at the University of Amsterdam and served as a research assistant in the project Literarizität in der Medienkunst at the University of Hamburg. She co-authored the monograph The Literariness of Media Art (Routledge, 2019). In 2024, she completed her PhD thesis on the willful queer-feminist poetics of 1990s riot grrrl films.