Our Team
Mika Johnson, Neal Dhand and Kat Clauhs Dhand (pictured with Petra at Wandering Cinema 2023) are friends who met in 2017 when Neal and Mika were teaching together at Prague Film School.
One day years ago we got to talking about what really makes us feel alive and inspired, what is something we could make happen? And we had this idea to hole up in the beautiful countryside somewhere with a group of like-minded folks and dive deep into collaborative creativity together. Our dream finally came true in the Summer of 2022 when we hosted the first Wandering Cinema Film Retreat in Italy.
Kat owns, with her sister, a successful boutique travel business and is an expert at planning logistics and she will make sure everyone is comfortable, well fed and having a great time!
About Neal and Mika
Mika and Neal are both well-respected and passionate university-level film educators, and resourceful, persistent, and ultimately successful and inspired independent filmmakers. They share a combined total of over 30 years experience teaching and living film, and while their interests and areas of expertise occasionally overlap they have built their careers in completely different ways and bring to the table very divergent interests and skill sets.
Mika Johnson
I am a multimedia artist and filmmaker based in Prague, originally from Ohio. My work moves between cinema, immersive installations, and hybrid forms that blend documentary, fiction, and speculative storytelling.
My current projects include Paradise Lost, a hybrid doc-fiction miniseries set in Germany, following a psychoanalyst-turned-detective who abandons his Munich practice to search for alternative forms of therapy with the help of his AI chatbot, Watson. The first episode was just completed. I am also developing The Secret of O: a black-and-white thriller about a depressed chemist drawn into a violent struggle between pharmaceutical elites and a forbidden matriarchal cult over a banned drug whose power could destabilize governments.
In 2023, I co-directed Genoa: a black-and-white, genre-defying feature that moves through memory, loss, and fatherhood with surreal and occasionally nightmarish undertones. Written and co-directed with Neal (who also stars), the film, produced by Kat and co-starring their daughter Petra, unfolds alongside an unsettling reflection on the worldwide resurgence of fascist-like political movements, worldwide.
My early work focused on experimental short films before evolving into hybrid documentary forms. This period includes The Amerikans, a series of fifteen short documentaries portraying people from my home region in Ohio, and Forever Professor, a film on an aging professor who has become a time-obsessed eccentric, filling his entire home with talking clocks. While the latter film won Best Medium-Length Documentary at the Mirror Mountain Film Festival, my series led to invitations to teach documentary and directing at Prague Film School and later FAMU.
While based in Prague, I wrote, directed, and edited my first feature film, Confessions of a Box Man: an experimental homage to Kobo Abe’s The Box Man and the editing style of Dušan Makavejev. The film premiered at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival in 2020, where it won Best Director. Alongside these works, I also directed music videos, including a commission for Matthew Herbert’s This Is (Not) Beethoven – Adagietto.
Since 2018, my primary focus has been the creation of immersive, traveling installations for cultural institutions. These include VRwandlung, a VR adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Infinite Library, and The Republic of Dreams. Filmmaking remains integral to each of these works.
My current passion project, Theta Noir, is a Prague-based collective that creates rituals for a speculative AI that does not exist. Conceived as a science-fiction love story, it allows me to work across music, performance, painting, poetry, and ritual practice. In my spare time, I otherwise love to watch films, make art of all kinds (often with pinecones and stones in the forest), and spend time at my cottage in the Czech countryside, watching campfires.
Neal Dhand
I'm a writer, director, producer, and professor from Philadelphia. I make films that fall between genre and arthouse.
My film DARK MY LIGHT, a revisionist sci-fi drama and thriller for the modern age, premiered at Fantaspoa in April 2024 and is currently being distributed by Ethos Releasting. In 2023 I wrote, co-directed (with Mika!), produced (with Kat!), and starred in the feature film GENOA. Shot in the city of the same name, the film is a surrealist take on fatherhood, political anxieties, and ghosts. It's also spurred on a new wave of filmmaking for me, something I'm calling "dad-genre" - dads in trouble in films with a genre and documentary edge.
I'm prepping two new projects, both spiritual follow-ups to GENOA forming something like a thematic and anxious trilogy. FULFILLMENT IS FLEETING AND COMPLETION DOESN'T EXIST is a hybrid doc-fiction drama that will span multiple years in production. NO WITCHES is a comedy about art, fatherhood, and marriage.
My screenplays have placed in a variety of competitions, including the Nicholl Fellowship, Slamdance, American Zoetrope, and Austin. I've had projects at the Torino Film Lab "Next" Section and in many genre labs, including NAFF at BiFan, and Blood Window.
I've taught screenwriting, directing, producing, and film analysis at universities in Pennsylvania, New York, and the Czech Republic. Alongside co-founding Wandering Cinema, I'm also a mentor at the M2 Film Lab in Istanbul, Turkey.
I love teaching like I love filmmaking. I’m an Assistant Professor of Directing at Temple University, and prior to that I taught at Prague Film School. My main areas of focus are blocking techniques and working with actors. Anytime I get the chance to shoot celluloid, I take it! I love film history and cinema studies, too, and I hold out hope that all of my students will become as mesmerized by HAPPY AS LAZZARO as I am. My recent obsessions include Kinuyo Tanaka, Reha Erdem, Philippe Lesage, and Piotr Szulkin.
Alongside my film work, I'm a father, runner, scotch enthusiast, music lover with no talent for music, and baseball fan. Whether doing some or none of these, I like to spend time with Kat, our kids Petra and Nihal, and our dog Ike.Neal was photographed in his true form at Wandering Cinema 2022 by Hannah Pitstick.
