they/them
Arts Division
MFA Student
Graduate
Staff
Science & Justice Research Center
Kresge College Academic Building
1202A
Film and Digital Media
Matte Hewitt is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, researcher, and environmentalist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their work integrates environmental humanities, critical Indigenous studies, and feminist science and technology studies. They are a Norris Center Art and Science Fellow and participate in the UC Santa Cruz Science and Justice Center Training Program. Before joining the Social Documentation program, Matte began their documentary production training at Scribe Video Center, a media center for social change and community empowerment in West Philadelphia. While there, they produced the documentary, WITH HOPE, a film centering the experiences of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people who reconnect to the outdoors through the act of birding, and by doing so discover a profound sense of belonging, joy, and hope. With over a decade of experience, they have contributed to numerous nonprofit organizations and collective art spaces. Matte holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
Their thesis is an essay film that moves with Hummingbird as a luminous guide, inviting an embodied engagement with place-based ways of knowing. Through storytelling and recorded conversations with Mutsun Ohlone and Chumash Chairwoman Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayers-Roods, the filmmaker learns about Central California Native Land and culture. Threading together interwoven narratives and lessons from Coyote, the film also traces the entanglement between the study of hummingbird biology and the rise of military drone technology, offering a multispecies perspective on knowledge, power, and kinship.
Environmental Humanities, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Multispecies Anthropology, Conservation Psychology, Participatory Community Media, Essay Film
2025, 2024 Florence J. French Scholarship
2024 Robert Leet-Corday Memorial Scholarship
2024 UCSC Soc Doc Summer Fellowship
2024 Ken Corday GROW grant
2022 Independent Creative Production grant
