Short docu about me & my work

BIOGRAPHY

Sonja van Hamel is an independent musician, filmmaker, and graphic designer. A playful artist with an adventurous spirit who likes to combine her various talents. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 1999. Since then she has worked as a freelance artist on both commissioned and artistic projects.

Between 1999 and 2006, she composed and performed music as pop duo Bauer with Berend Dubbe. They created colorful, layered songs, drawing inspiration from 1960s/1970s pop and film music. Lucious melodies and lyrics were combined with contemporary samples, beats, analog keyboards, and orchestral arrangements. In 2000, Bauer won the Silver Harp for their album Can’t Stop Singing. Their final album, The Bauer Melody of 2006, was a live recording of their performance with the renowned Metropole Orkest.

In 2009, she embarked on a solo music career, releasing two albums, Winterland and Transcendental Man. She composed music for several short and feature films, documentaries, and animations. In 2010, she developed a visual live performance called “Draw Clips” featuring analog animation machines to accompany her music. She performed at many film, literature, and animation festivals, including the Netherlands Film Festival, Klik! Animation Festival and was taken on tour by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Driven by her passion for film and animation, she has increasingly focused on creating moving images since 2017. She has produced live animations for theatre shows by The Analogues and stop-motion animations for the children’s program Het Klokhuis (NTR). In 2022, she was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to create a short film about the work of Sophie Calle. In this project, she took pieces from Calle’s exhibition Les Fantômes d'Orsay and transformed them by animation and a self-recorded soundscape into moving imagery that is telling a story of their own.

The short film/music video Goodbye to Mercury was selected for the Netherlands Film Festival and GoShort festival Nijmegen, where it received a special mention. It’s the first part of her new project, Inner Solar System, which will be presented in 2026 as a physical music album and a film project.