Asya Nikolaeva

Asya is a Kharkiv-born and raised, San Francisco-based film director and the founder of “On A Whim Films” production company. Originally from Ukraine, she learned the art of filmmaking in Kyiv, Moscow, London, and San Francisco, where she got her Master’s degree of Fine Arts in Directing. Asya has more than 10 years of experience in the film production business on different stages of project development. After participating in the 58th Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Talent Campus) with her short music film “The Bear” shot on 16mm, she realized that her goal and passion are storytelling and feature films. Her experience spans from feature and short films, music videos, television to documentaries. She has always been in between European sophisticated storytelling and American epic and large-scale approach in filmmaking. In 2020 she started her long-awaited collaboration with electronic musicians when she directed the music video “Ballet” for a German musician Christopher Loeffler. Asya absorbed the unique esthetic and cultural codes that served her as a background of her personal vision and film taste through Bergman, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Fellini, directors of French New Wave and Italian Neorealism.