Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich was born in 1987. Her mother is poet Erica Hunt and her father is jazz musician Marty Ehrlich. She grew up in an artist co-op in Alphabet City in New York. [4]
In 2022, the film Conspiracy, a co-production with contemporary artist Simone Leigh, was premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams as part of Leigh's solo project at the United States Pavilion.[5]
Several of Hunt-Ehrlich's films comment and revisit history. Her film "Spit on the Broom" portrays the story of the United Order of Tents, a congregation of Black women advocating for underserved communities around the country.[6][7]
Hunt-Ehrlich's cinematic productions have been featured in film festivals around the United States and abroad. In 2020, Hunt-Ehrlich was selected as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine.[13]
"Whether or not the broader cinematic landscape is ready to change, Hunt-Ehrlich is honing her own distinctive approach to the dramatization of Black stories, one that values opacity and abstraction over linear narrative."[13]
In 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, had hosted the Whitney Biennial, a contemporary art exhibition held every two years, had showcased Hunt-Ehrlich's film, Too Bright to See (Part I), produced by Sophie Luo and Mike S. Ryan. She was amongst seventy-one visionary artists and collectives participating in the installment. The film had been attached to a light installation alluding to the perspective to the mercurial weather of the Caribbean Islands, in homage to Césaire's engagement to the natural world.
Hunt-Ehrlich is the recipient of several awards such as a 2022 Creative Capital Award in Experimental Film, Narrative Film,[19] a 2022 Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship,[20] 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO/Ford Foundation Fellowship, a 2015 TFI Future Filmmaker Award, and a Princess Grace Award 2014 Graduate Film Scholarship.[21][22]
In 2020, she was a finalist for the Biennale College Cinema, from the Venice Film Festival. Hunt-Ehrlich's has also received support from San Francisco Film Society's Rainin Grant for the screenwriting phase of the feature film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.[17][19]
