ABOUT

Saelyx Finna (she/they) works at the frontier of cinema, technology, and the dreaming mind, creating media about the emergence of dream tech: technology that directly interacts with the dreaming mind. 

As a filmmaker and researcher, Saelyx has presented on the neuroethics of dream technologies at the Interaction Design Association in Milan, the Dream Engineering Seminar led by neuroscientists from MIT, Casino Display in Luxembourg, ByDesign in Seattle, Grinnell College in Iowa, the Advaya Platform in the UK, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams in the Netherlands. 

UNDER THE DREAM is her directorial debut, a work of somatic cinema exploring the multiverse of our dreaming minds and the transformative potential of dream tech. Find out more about these projects. 

Previously, Saelyx served as artistic and executive director of Northwest Film Forum (NWFF), Seattle’s nonprofit film center and arthouse theater. Under her previous name, Courtney Sheehan, she was named one of the “50 Most Influential Women in Seattle” by Seattle Met magazine (2018), honored with the City of Seattle’s Mayor’s Arts Award for Arts & Innovation (2017), and selected as one of City Arts magazine’s “Artists of the Year” (2015). While at NWFF, she co-founded Alliance for Action, a national network of US-based exhibitors and distributors working to make the film industry more equitable. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and on the Criterion Channel. 

After NWFF, Saelyx founded Context Moves, a consultancy specializing in film distribution and strategic communications, drawing on her experience as a programmer, producer, nonprofit CEO, journalist, story consultant, and impact strategist. Clients include Sundance, AMC, DOC NYC, the Criterion Collection, Film Independent, Cinereach, Academy Award nominees, and George R.R. Martin’s Highgarden Entertainment. 

Saelyx grew up in the middle of five kids in a village in rural Ohio. She studied at Grinnell College, where she designed the school’s first degree in Visual Culture. Upon graduating, she was awarded a prestigious Watson Fellowship, living out of a backpack for a year while working with 20 film festivals across eight countries.