Bianca Calandra is a French-Australian designer, visual artist, musician and filmmaker who was born in Sydney, Australia and is now based in the south-west of France.
Working within the realms of video, animation, sound, music and painting, over the past decade her body of work has leaned towards dark, dystopian and science fiction inspired universes.
Bianca studied at COFA/UNSW (BA of Design) and won a scholarship to study at Metroscreen (Cert. in Television and Video production).
She has since supplemented her studies with other workshops, short courses and certificate courses at AFTRS (Cert. in Art direction), NIDA (Directing essentials), TAFE NSW (Cert. III & IV in Music business), Sydney Conservatorium open academy (Vocal Horizons, Jazz vocal, Music fundamentals).
She completed an internship with the now-defunct stop motion animation company ENT where she designed, created and animated puppets for Channel 7 Christmas idents. After university, she worked for several years within the Australian film industry on larger film and TV productions (in the capacity of art department assistant) and on smaller, independent film productions (as a production designer).
She then changed course to focus more on fine art (mixed media painting) and music production (textural, collage pop). Living within the vibrant artist community building ‘Hibernian House’ in Sydney’s inner city for several years, she produced a solo EP ('Elevate the Everyday Ordinary' as B.Calandra), toured the East coast of Australia, gained local and national JJJ airplay, exhibited artwork in and around Sydney, and received a BUZZ grant to develop new music (Australian Council for the Arts) before heading to Europe.
As a visual artist, Bianca has exhibited artwork in Australia, Germany and France. As a musician, she has collaborated with Royalston (AUS), ETNAH (DE), Hollywood Mon Amour (FR), Holidays on Ice (AUS) and Sickerman (DE).
Bianca spent several intense periods performing, exhibiting and collaborating with other artists/musicians in Berlin, Germany. Whilst there, she participated in Two artist residencies (Transit Lounge), created album art, photos and music video for Sickerman (Blank records, DE) and began a new combined music and visual project ‘Machine est mon Coeur’ with French jazz and experimental musician Gabin Lopez. This new project led her back into film as a director/designer/animator via music and art video.
Bianca is the guitarist/vocalist in French ethereal darkwave duo ‘Machine est mon Coeur’ who have released one self-titled EP (2007), and one LP 'Dystopium' (2015). Machine est mon Coeur write, produce and record all of their own work. They have performed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Australia. Machine est mon Coeur have also participated in Two music residencies in France.
Bianca has directed all of Machine est mon Coeur's music videos to date, as well as creating their album covers, photos and merch. In 2019, Machine est mon Coeur film clips have been officially selected to screen at film festivals in the USA, Norway, Finland, Russia, Romania, Greece, Poland, Croatia, Brazil, Colombia and Portugal.
In 2019, her short stop motion animation 'Trainwreck' won Best experimental film at the 'Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival' in New York, USA.
Bianca has a strong DIY ethic and is interested in micro-crew filmmaking.
As a director/designer, Bianca is currently working on a short, independent, science fiction/art house film. Machine est mon Coeur will create the soundtrack...
