Shana Berger is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and creative instigator whose work is rooted in curiosity, collaboration, and a belief that art can create space for people to see themselves and one another differently.

Her creative practice has moved freely between photography, public art, socially engaged work, community building, writing, and filmmaking. Rather than treating those as separate pursuits, Shana sees them as different tools for asking the same kinds of questions: How do our histories shape who we become? What allows people to feel free enough to be themselves? What happens when we make something together that couldn't have existed alone?

Early in her career, Shana co-founded Your Art Here, an artist-run project that transformed billboards into spaces for collaborative and politically engaged public art. The project continued for twenty years and eventually brought her to York, Alabama, where she became deeply involved with the Coleman Center for the Arts. There, her work expanded beyond making objects to creating experiences, relationships, and spaces for collaboration across communities.

Throughout it all, storytelling remained a constant. Shana had wanted to make films since childhood, and eventually the pull became impossible to ignore. Filmmaking now brings together many of the ideas that have shaped her life as an artist: observation, social engagement, humor, memory, collaboration, and the strange and complicated business of being human.

Her current film, Fingers Up, is part of that evolution. Like much of Shana's work, it is interested in people who don't quite fit where the world expects them to, and in what can happen when they are given the freedom to become more fully themselves.

Shana believes creativity belongs to everyone, that the most interesting work often happens between people, and that an artistic life should leave room to follow a question wherever it leads.

After decades of working across mediums, she's still asking questions.

She's just gotten more comfortable not knowing where they'll take her.