If there's one artist in the London scene who best merges art and dance, it's filmmaker Daria Martin. Martin films actors interacting with unusual moving sets and props accompanied by eerie soundtracks, creating surreal, melancholy tableaux. In her early films, her subjects form geometric, modernist-inspired compositions, while in more recent projects, she explores new territory; in 2004's Soft Materials, naked dancers mirror and react to the movements of artificially intelligent robots.

Born in San Francisco, Martin attended Yale University for her undergraduate studies and earned her MFA at UCLA in 2000. Her debut film and first in a trilogy, 2000's In the Palace records a series of scenes performed on a cage-like set — a steel version of Alberto Giacometti's 1932 sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. In the trilogy's midpoint, 2001's Birds, women with colorful headdresses perch on minimal sets, while the camera pans from left to right and circles in balletic arcs. Closeup Gallery, from 2003, completes Martin's modernist homage; the kinetic, abstract compositions manifest her ambition to make "magic acts that show how the trick is done."

A prolific collaborator, the Beck's Futures-nominated artist has worked with fashion designer Hamish Morrow, '60s actress Rita Tushingham, and composer and musician Zeena Parkins, demonstrating her ability to mix mediums and ideas. The ambitious Wintergarden from 2005 takes Greek goddess Persephone as its inspiration, with dancers recreating her story at Sussex's starkly modernist De La Warr Pavilion — combining dance, mythology, and architecture to stunning effect. Never repetitive and always unexpected, Martin's films represent mixed media at its most inspirational and thought-provoking.

-LCD