Lea Aymard
Lea Aymard is a writer, director of photography, actress, and interdisciplinary artist active since 1998, living and working in Slovenia since 2006. Born in France, she attended theatre high school and studied acting. Between 1996 and 2002, she worked as an actress and cultural manager, developing projects with diverse publics, including prisoners, people with disabilities, and children. These early experiences grounded her practice in social engagement, accessibility, and collective creation.
In 2005, she moved to Slovenia as a European volunteer and worked at the Youth Center in Laško, where she led video workshops for young people. During this period, she began to develop her filmmaking practice, gradually specializing as a director of photography. She went on to collaborate with a wide range of productions, including National Slovenian Television (RTV Slovenija), Mangart, POP TV, Zavod Kineki, as well as independent film and television projects.
Alongside her professional work, she became the mother of two children. In 2017, she came out as a transgender woman. Her transition marked a profound personal and professional rupture, during which she lost her job and experienced systemic exclusion. For several years, she worked as a sex worker, an experience that deeply shaped her understanding of labor, intimacy, precarity, and autonomy. During this time, she volunteered with TransAkcija, the first Slovenian transgender organization, and later worked there as a community worker, peer-to-peer counsellor, and activist for transgender human rights.
Parallel to her activism, she extended her filmmaking practice through collaborations with non-governmental organizations, developing projects aligned with her ethical and political values. She also worked as an actress and as a personal assistant to people with disabilities, further grounding her artistic practice in care, relationality, and lived experience.
More recently, she has focused increasingly on writing. In 2024, she published her first prose book, Komunin mrk (Maska), a queer science fiction work and the first prose book written by a trans woman in Slovenia. Today, her practice moves across literature, film, performance, and visual media, operating at the intersections between disciplines. Through an interdisciplinary approach, her work explores gender, embodiment, memory, labor, and solidarity, insisting on complexity, accountability, and the political potential of care.