A Machine to Live In is a feature-length documentary about the imaginative and material processes of building one's utopia. It documents the history of highly controlled modernist planning in Brazil alongside radical projects in cult and mystical architecture. The film's attention radiates outward from Niemeyer and Costa's capital, Brasília, to the flourishing landscape of UFO cults, energy gathering pyramids, mother temples, and futurist monuments. These fractured vignettes emerge from found text by Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector, and her writings on the inauguration of Brasília and subsequent interviews with Oscar Niemeyer. Her existential journalism describes new subjective and mythic cosmologies that may one day disrupt the city's fraught order. A Machine to Live In attempts to locate where the desires for myth and reason sublimates in the building of utopian spaces. It collects landscapes and stories from architects, dwellers, and builders as they describe their ideal cities, both real and transcendent.

Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke are award-winning international filmmakers, cinematographers, and editors. Goldstein and Zielke work collaboratively on social documentary projects: from examining hybridized healing practices in the Northern Andes (La Curación), to children in American prisons (Natural Life), to critical explorations of history and somatic memory (The Jettisoned). Their films have been presented internationally across several major festivals, conferences, and classrooms. Goldstein and Zielke's work as directors and cinematographers has been selected and awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, the Festival Black Movie de Genève, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Hot Springs Documentary Festival, the Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec, the Festival International du Documentaire et Rencontres sur la Biodiversité et les Peuples, Hot Docs Digital Doc Shop, Globians Doc Fest Berlin, and many others.

Sebastian Alvarez is a San Francisco Bay Area-based interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher. Working across diverse media, including film, audio, performance, and installation, his artistic practice explores the interrelation and fragmentation of human systems. With a focus on ritualistic performance, Alvarez draws upon notions of intimacy and estrangement, and employs the use of silence and the musicality of "untranslated" language. He received a BFA (2009) and an MFA (2011) in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has performed, curated, and presented work internationally at such venues and institutions as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, the South Side Community Art Center, the Whitney Biennial (NYC), Postgarage (Graz, Austria), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt), and the Festival Internacional de Cine de Barichara (Barichara, Colombia).

Andrew Benz is a professional cinematographer, RED camera technologist, and studio owner based in Chicago. His award winning broadcast and industry films have featured on the BBC, CNN, ESPN, ABC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. Benz specializes in independent film, television, and documentary cinematography, with an emphasis on aerial, motion control, and experimental strategies for moving image projects.

Lou Mallozzi is an audio artist in Chicago who dismembers and reconstitutes sound, language, gesture, and image in various media. He works in live performance, radio art, sound installation, CD recording, soundtrack design, and visual art. He has presented works at numerous festivals, concerts, galleries, and broadcasts since 1986, including the Bludenz Festival for Contemporary Music (Austria), the TUBE Audio Art Series (Munich), Fylkingen (Stockholm), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Indiana), Podewil (Berlin), the PAC/edge Performance Festival (Chicago), Aetherfest Radio Art Festival (Albuquerque), the Resonance FM Radio Festival (London), Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich), the Chicago Cultural Center, the Donald Young Gallery, Corbett vs Dempsey, and many others.

Iva Radivojevic is an award-winning filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She spent her early years in Yugoslavia and Cyprus before settling in New York. Her films explore the theme of identity, migration, and belonging; she has screened at numerous film festivals, including SxSW, the Rotterdam IFF, Human Rights Watch, HotDocs, the Museum of Modern Art; and her films were broadcast on PBS, the Documentary Channel, and the New York Times’s Op-Docs. Her collaborative film Matthew 24:14 won the 2011 International Documentary Challenge competition for Best Director, Best Film, and Best Use of Genre. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a Princess Grace Special Project Award (2012), a Princess Grace Film Fellowship (2011), and was a participating talent at the Berlinale Talent Campus (2012). In 2013, she was named one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. Her debut feature-length documentary Evaporating Borders won numerous awards worldwide, was recently nominated for an International Documentary Association (IDA) Award and a Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award, and received a World Media Award for Refugee Reporting.