Award-winning filmmaker inspires Fairhaven students in untraditional ways

Art can feel mysterious and, at times, difficult to engage with. Each artist’s practice and process are unique, and even with a finished piece of art, it’s not always obvious what you’re looking at. But what if we all agreed it’s ok to start small and important to trust your own instincts and reactions?

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, assistant professor at WWU’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, playwright and interdisciplinary artist who encourages his students to start small and pay attention to what sparks. 

One of his most celebrated projects is a good example of this approach. It started in a used bookstore in Berlin, where he discovered the work of Joanna Rajkowska, a Polish contemporary artist based in Warsaw and London.

Yerachmiel Sniderman liked what he saw and sent her an email.

The connection that followed led to Yerachmiel Sniderman and Rajkowska’s distinguished film “Night Herons,” which won the 2024 ING Polish Art Foundation Grand Prize and was recently permanently acquired by Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej Warsaw, or the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. 

“Night Herons” is an extraordinary collection of scenes using marionettes in natural settings to explore violence and memory. The film weaves together threads from more than 100 years of Yerachmiel Sniderman and Rajkowska’s personal family narratives. 

“In part, 'Night Herons' is about Jewish memory in Poland. We draw parallels between the destruction of human worlds and non-human worlds and the intersections between them,” said Yerachmiel Sniderman.

In his current art practice, Yerachmiel Sniderman is really into walking — walking as an artistic and social medium. He’s made art in a variety of places from Rhode Island, Poland and Arizona to Berlin and Whatcom County, and on a basic level, his creative work tends to be centered on the place he’s in while creating it. 

And what better way to experience a place than to research its history and spend a lot of time walking through it?

The way walking generates internal questions about a person’s relationship to the world is what’s crucial to his work as an artist and teacher. 

Yerachmiel Sniderman says it’s the stuff between sight, hearing and touch that’s important when walking, things like feelings, instincts, reactions. He encourages his students to pay attention, to notice what washes over them when observing a particular place, and to trust the importance of their own responses. 

Fairhaven student Kenzie Ellis said that in their experience with Yerachmiel Sniderman, the whole idea is to notice and act on what occurs to you without judging it. 

“A lot of times as art students, we’re focused on the aesthetics of a project from the very beginning — or this big, intimidating vision that we have to carry out,” Ellis said. “But from Robert, I’ve learned that, first, it’s a process of letting unfiltered thoughts come into your mind and flow onto the page.” 

Ellis says vulnerability is also key. 

“It’s all very vulnerable, which is another thing that's integral to Robert’s classes. Bringing all that we are, not just as students, but as people into the classroom. In that way, we’re creating a space to interact with our fears,” Ellis said.

Wil Henkel, a Fairhaven alumnus, current WWU graduate student of anthropology and activist media maker, said Sniderman’s classes on walking have helped him see the world in a whole new light.

“Robert’s ‘Walking in Traumatic Time’ was one of the most stimulating and interesting courses I’ve ever taken. He propelled me to think about my own life through art in a general sense, then to apply that critically and engage with ideas about personal identity and history to dissect the common narratives we tell ourselves,” Henkel said.

Yerachmiel Sniderman said “Walking in Traumatic Time” is a class that yields a number of things for students.

“In that class, students are working with the politics of ethnic cleansing, whether it’s local or regional, national or international. They create walking projects that may look more like a social ritual, or it might look like a public theater or video art,” said Sniderman.

Henkel applies what he’s learned from Yerachmiel Sniderman to his master’s research and to his work with the nonprofit organization Rios to Rivers, where he guides underserved and Indigenous youth through becoming the next generation of environmental stewards of their home watersheds.

“We spent a lot of time walking outside, walking in place and thinking about walking, which felt very mundane at times. And actually, I prefer to bike,” Henkel said laughing. “But then there’s Robert, who is thinking deeply about what it means to walk and how to walk in space and time as a kind of embodiment of trauma. In particular, while walking, we focused on the historic memory of people who have been displaced, uprooted or impacted through genocide.”

Henkel continues to collaborate with Sniderman, even after graduating from Fairhaven, and is credited as assistant director on a film they made together called “بيان الصعود إلى السماء flight manifesto.” 

“Flight Manifesto” was made in collaboration with hearing and Deaf WWU students and community members and hard-of-hearing Palestinian musician Dirar Kalash. The film follows the collective on a silent, three-part, 15-hour walk along the Nooksack River. You can read more about the project and watch the film here. 

One way Yerachmiel Sniderman concretely inspires Western’s Fairhaven students to begin in a small and personal way is to consider the arrangement of their bedroom.

“I ask them to rearrange materials in their living space to say something about a forgotten or erased past. It’s kind of like starting at the base,” said Sniderman. “This is a space you have control over. You can create meaning there just by changing the way things are arranged.”

Yerachmiel Sniderman’s focus on ordinary spaces and activities — like one’s home and walking — sound mundane at first, but Fairhaven student Kenzie Ellis said the focus on the mundane is part of the point.

“For the assignment to make an intervention in our living space, I just remember seeing everyone’s work in class and how they were disrupting their roommates. For the sake of this artwork and for the sake of trying out an idea. I just love it,” said Ellis. “I love art’s power to put people out of the normal and disrupt the mundane.” 

Ellis participated in a three-month Global Learning Program course taught by Yerachmiel Sniderman in Berlin in 2023. 

“The ability to come into a new space and take it in with reverence — it changed me,” said Ellis. “We visited sites with complicated, often violent histories, like the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, an old train site where a lot of Jewish citizens were forcibly removed from Berlin and taken to Nazi concentration camps. I’ve been made much more aware, and I now appreciate the power of noticing and feeling what came into my mind without judging it. Having those experiences guided by Robert has really helped me be more present.” 

Ellis’s self-designed concentration is called Aesthetics of Resistance: Socially Engaged Writing and Art, and they often engage with memory politics in their work, including themes of “counter-memorialization” and “counter-narrative.” Check out "Burn Procession," Ellis's project from Sniderman's fall 2025 course here. 

“Meeting Robert was very transformative for me as an artist and a person. He initially exposed me to a whole new realm of place- and performance-based, socially engaged art. I never really knew that was a possibility, and now it’s all I do,” said Ellis. 

This fall, Yerachmiel Sniderman will teach “Berlin: City of Remembering and Forgetting” in an institutional collaboration between Western’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts Berlin.

Yerachmiel Sniderman and Rajkowska are also working on another film called “My Life in the Shadow of the Sun” that will tell the story of Rajkowka’s life alongside a narrative of environmental destruction, global warming and concurrent political crises. The film is set to debut in Budapest’s Ludwig Museum of modern and contemporary art in 2027. 

Learn more about designing your own education at WWU’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies here. 

Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.