Champ Ensminger

Champ Ensminger is a filmmaker born in Chiang Mai, Thailand and raised in Spokane, Washington. As a lover of music, Champ’s visual storytelling interests have ranged from documentaries on music subcultures, to experiments in music video filmed stateside and in his home country. His recent music-driven narrative short films, “Pony Blues” (2014) and “Us” (2015), touch on topics of Eastern philosophy as informed by a mixture of folklore and genre filmmaking. Champ has shown his films at the Seattle Art Museum, National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY), Local Sightings at Northwest Film Forum, Next Dance Cinema at Velocity Dance Center, and Cascadia NW Arts and Music Festival, among others.

Champ received the 2019 GAP Award to fund YAI NIN, a documentary film focusing on his maternal grandmother in Thailand and the relationship dynamics created and lost as the matriarch of an immigrant family. This funding will be in the service of post-production and exhibition costs for the film, which will pursue public viewings and a festival run in the coming year.