Tessa Hughes-Freeland is British-born experimental filmmaker who has used found footage in her work for many years. She studied history of art at University College London, where she aligned herself with the radical performance artist Stuart Brisley. After graduating from UCL, Hughes-Freeland pursued an MA in cinema studies at New York University, where she also completed a course by P. Adam Sitney, working as his teaching assistant at the Cooper Union. Hughes-Freeland has written about film in the East Village Eye, Paper Magazine, and the Underground Film Bulletin. As part of the downtown No Wave scene in the late 1970s, she met people such as the Three Kens, who owned a film club and rented out Super 8 cameras that allowed her to make films. She also collaborated for many years with the Cuban-born, New York-based artist Ela Troyano. In the early 1980s, Hughes-Freeland started programming at a club called LIMBO amongst a growing community of artists who were active in the neighborhood. With Troyano she started the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984, a three-day festival which ran for five years. Hughes-Freeland also served as President of the Board of Directors of the Film-Makers Co-Operative from 1998 to 2001. Her found footage films have screened internationally in North America, Europe, and Australia, and in prominent museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY), and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin). She has collaborated on live multi-media projects with musicians like John Zorn and JG Thirlwell.