17 Oct 2026 · 2,864 works · 698 news indexed
Italian director, one half of the Milan- and Brooklyn-based duo Mathery, whose AI short Where Knights Fall won Silver at Runway's 2026 AI Festival.
Biography
Erika Zorzi is one half of Mathery, the Italian directing duo she formed with Matteo Sangalli. Both studied at NABA in Milan, meeting as product design students, and took the name Mathery from a 2010 blog for which they built one object a day for about 100 days. After years working in Australia, Asia and Italy they moved to Brooklyn, and they are now based between Milan and Brooklyn and represented by 1stAveMachine. A 2020 interview describes Zorzi as leading the duo's research, storytelling, art direction and overall look.
Mathery's work spans film, photography, and exhibition and object design. It includes the Pastello – Draw Act exhibition for the National Gallery of Victoria, a 2014 IDEA Awards winner; the opening film for OFFF 2018; the shorts Fiber Affair (on Nowness), The Artists' Room and Blue or Green; and their narrative debut, The Cranberry Effect. They have made branded films for Samsung, Ikea, Amex, Delta, Facebook and Google, and received the Young Guns 16 award.
The duo's 2025 AI short A Feather and a Prayer, a satire about "pigeon bikinis" just under four minutes long, used Runway's Frames, Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, Act-One and Generative Audio with Midjourney, from a script partly written with ChatGPT; graphics, music and sound were made without AI. Their AI short Where Knights Fall, a Rapunzel story set beneath a tower ringed by failed suitors, won Silver in the film category of Runway's 2026 AI Festival.
Process
Own stills as references
The duo (Mathery) says that at the start of their AI experiments they fed the model stills from their own past work as a pure style reference, and later stopped, relying instead on detailed prompts for art direction, locations and costume.
Source: lbbonline.comPrompt and edit together
Mathery says they prompt and edit at the same time, laying generations on a timeline to judge each export and decide whether a compromise is good enough before moving to the next scene.
Source: lbbonline.comTools used on a short
For A Feather and a Prayer the duo used ChatGPT to partly write the script, Runway Frames and Midjourney for images, Gen-3 Alpha Turbo for footage, Act-One for the dialogue and Runway's generative audio for narration, with graphics, titles, music and sound made traditionally.
Source: lbbonline.com