KEYNOTE PRESENTERS
Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), Assistant Professor, University of California Santa Barbara
Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory & Practice at University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, she co-founded Wireframe, a new digital media studio that supports critical game design, data visualization, VR/augmented realities, digital arts and activism. Her current book project theorizes the “glitch” at the intersection of digital protocols (rules that seek standardization and stabilization) and exploits (interventions that seek to upstage/subvert protocols for their own agendas, most often associated with the realms of hacktivism and piracy). As VJ Um Amel, Sakr has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, Kirchner Cultural Centre in Argentina, Fridge Art Gallery in Washington, DC, and 100 Copies in Egypt, among other venues. Her journal articles appear in Middle East Critique, Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies, Parson’s Journal for Information Mapping, Thoughtmesh: Critical Code Journal, and Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities (forthcoming).
Rick Prelinger, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and outsider librarian. In 1982, he founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of industrial, advertising, educational and amateur films that was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive (of which he is a board member) to make 2,100 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world. Prelinger has recently made several film programs that he categorizes as “historical interventions,” called Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (7 annual parts) and Lost Landscapes of Detroit (3 annual parts). With Megan Prelinger, he is the co-founder of Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library open to the public in downtown San Francisco. His archival work currently focuses on collecting, recontextualizing, and exhibiting home movies and amateur films.
Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory & Practice at University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, she co-founded Wireframe, a new digital media studio that supports critical game design, data visualization, VR/augmented realities, digital arts and activism. Her current book project theorizes the “glitch” at the intersection of digital protocols (rules that seek standardization and stabilization) and exploits (interventions that seek to upstage/subvert protocols for their own agendas, most often associated with the realms of hacktivism and piracy). As VJ Um Amel, Sakr has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, Kirchner Cultural Centre in Argentina, Fridge Art Gallery in Washington, DC, and 100 Copies in Egypt, among other venues. Her journal articles appear in Middle East Critique, Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies, Parson’s Journal for Information Mapping, Thoughtmesh: Critical Code Journal, and Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities (forthcoming).
Rick Prelinger, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and outsider librarian. In 1982, he founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of industrial, advertising, educational and amateur films that was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive (of which he is a board member) to make 2,100 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world. Prelinger has recently made several film programs that he categorizes as “historical interventions,” called Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (7 annual parts) and Lost Landscapes of Detroit (3 annual parts). With Megan Prelinger, he is the co-founder of Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library open to the public in downtown San Francisco. His archival work currently focuses on collecting, recontextualizing, and exhibiting home movies and amateur films.
CLOSING REMARKS
Abigail De Kosnik, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies. Her book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, was published by MIT Press in 2016. She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Her courses include: History and Theory of New Media (one of the core required seminars for the Designated Emphasis in New Media), Performance and Technology, and Performance, Television, and Social Media. She is currently writing a book on artists, politicians, journalists, and “regular” media users who self-identify as media pirates, tentatively titled Performing Piracy. De Kosnik is one of the faculty co-organizers of The Color of New Media, a working group sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender that focuses on intersections of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies. De Kosnik is Filipina American.
Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies. Her book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, was published by MIT Press in 2016. She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Her courses include: History and Theory of New Media (one of the core required seminars for the Designated Emphasis in New Media), Performance and Technology, and Performance, Television, and Social Media. She is currently writing a book on artists, politicians, journalists, and “regular” media users who self-identify as media pirates, tentatively titled Performing Piracy. De Kosnik is one of the faculty co-organizers of The Color of New Media, a working group sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender that focuses on intersections of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies. De Kosnik is Filipina American.
PRESENTERS
Andrea Avidad, Bronx Community College
Andrea Avidad is an adjunct lecturer at the Communication Arts & Sciences department at the Bronx Community College. She currently teaches Intercultural Communication and World Cinema. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, she finished her MA in Media Studies at The New School in New York City. She is interested in ‘marginal’ cinematic practices which challenge traditional language and mainstream modes of production.
Rachel Julia Engler, Columbia University
Rachel Julia Engler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and a graduate fellow of the university’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Samantha Freeman, Northwestern University
Samantha Freeman is a PhD candidate from Northwestern’s Screen Cultures program. Her dissertation examines depictions of sexual violence in contemporary American television series. Her work aims to understand how serialized rape narratives operate under specifically gendered and racialized cultural logics in our contemporary moment which has seen a recent proliferation in these types of stories. She received her BA in Film and Media from the University of California Berkeley and an MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern.
Sophie Gilmore, Harvard University
Sophie Gilmore is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, with research interests in digital media, film (especially Hollywood), popular culture, and HP Lovecraft. She has an MA in art history from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and is a published critic of contemporary art.
Brett Kashmere, University of California, Santa Cruz
Brett Kashmere is a media artist, historian, curator, and doctoral student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also the founding editor of INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media. His writing on experimental cinema, sports media, moving image art, and alternative film exhibition has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal, PUBLIC, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Senses of Cinema, The Films of Jack Chambers, Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, and Coming Down the Mountain: Rethinking the 1972 Summit Series.
Yu Jin Jeong, University of Southern California
Yu Jin Jeong is a first-year student pursuing a masters degree in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts. She received a bachelor’s degree in media studies and economics from University of California, Berkeley with a minor in History of Art. She is interested in global cinema and musical films.
Jason LaRiviere, New York University
Jason LaRiviere is currently completing his PhD in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His writing has appeared in boundary 2, Parrhesia, e-flux, The Brooklyn Rail, and is forthcoming in the collection Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History. His current project considers compression as a technical process and philosophical concept.
Jasper Lauderdale, New York University
Jasper Lauderdale is a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he studies the interplay between race, gender, sexuality, and temporality in radical speculative art. Jasper trained as a documentary filmmaker and editor at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and his work for such artists as Lydie Diakhaté, Amie Siegel, and David Hammons has appeared at the 56th Venice Biennale, the 23rd New York African Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Dia:Chelsea, and Dak’art 2018.
Victoria Le-Sweatman, University of Iowa
Originally trained as a poet and literary scholar at the University of Michigan and Brown University, Victoria Le-Sweatman is currently pursuing her MA in Film Studies at the University of Iowa.
Catherine Martin, Boston University
Catherine Martin is a PhD candidate in Boston University’s American and New England Studies Program. Her research focuses on representations of women in radio and television crime programs, with a focus on cultural depictions of women’s labor between World War II and the emergence of Second Wave Feminism. Her work has appeared in The Velvet Light Trap and Radio Journal.
Laurel McLaughlin, Bryn Mawr College
Laurel McLaughlin is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, working with Professor Homay King. Her dissertation traces the strategies of “migratory aesthetics” in the work of contemporary feminist performance artists working in the United States from the 1960s to present. She has presented her research at The University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and Georgia State University. Alongside such research, Laurel has worked at several art institutions, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Slought Foundation, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. She has co-curated the exhibitions, Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms at Bryn Mawr College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA); SWARM. (featuring the work of Didier William and Nestor Armando Gil) at PAFA; and Infinite Spaces: Rediscovering PAFA’s Permanent Collection, in addition to working as a PAFA curatorial assistant on the exhibitions Nick Cave: Rescue and the current retrospective, Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, among others. Most recently, she worked on the exhibition Camp Pause, by artist Tania El Khoury and developed a series of programs and Symposium in conjunction with the artist’s residency entitled, ear-whispered, this fall as a Bryn Mawr College Ridgway Curatorial Fellow.
Erin Nunoda, University of Toronto
Erin Nunoda is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. She is interested in sexual ethics, public space and political aesthetics, with a particular focus on queer sociality and its interactions with cinematic form.
Colin Ross, Independent Scholar
Colin Ross is an art historian and interdisciplinary curator specializing in the politics of vision with particular attention to the 20th and 21st centuries. Colin received his Master’s in History of Art from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s magna cum laude, also in Art History, from Columbia University. Throughout both degrees, he specialized in art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with a focus on photography and particular attention to conflicts at the intersection of culture, technology, and politics. Over the past eight years, he has paired my academic and writing pursuits with developing a museum career. To date, he has assisted with seven museum exhibitions or installations, researched for five museum catalogues, and helped plan and produce numerous public programs. Colin has published art historical essays in both English and Spanish (in which he is fluent), including a contribution on Edward Hopper to the Ashmolean Museum’s America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper exhibition catalogue. This winter he will be presenting, and later publishing, a paper on artist Bruce Conner at an interdisciplinary conference held by the Stavanger Art Museum and the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Alicia Roy, University of California, Berkeley
Alicia Roy is a doctoral candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of German, with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media. Her dissertation research is concerned with issues of authorship and intellectual property in early 20th century Germany. She is a member of the Berkeley-Tübingen-Vienna-Harvard working group “The Emergence of German Modernity,” co-director of the student professionalization group Beyond Academia, and lover of yoga and cat videos.
Diana Ryu, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Diana Ryu is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Often beginning with institutional or personal archives, her research, writing, and studio practice in filmmaking has been informed by how the circulation of images and stories of the past is collected and preserved over time to continuously render (trans)national memory and identity. With her experience working at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Soul Art Space in South Korea, various film festivals, and non-profit organizations, she has been able to engage in dialogues with scholars, artists, filmmakers from various backgrounds and interests. More recently, she has been actively involved with film programming through organizations such as Nightingale Cinema (leading microcinema in Chicago), Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (gallery in Chicago), and ExTV (SAIC’s student-run broadcasting organization). She is particularly committed to providing a platform for filmmakers working with analog equipment and unconventional filmmaking processes that move away from the homogenous canonization of film.
Caufield Schnug, Harvard University
Caufield Schnug is a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His research interests tend to circulate around questions of space, media, affect, and aesthetics. More to the point, most of his work deals with the material and multi-medial construction of atmosphere and ambience in relation to visual culture. Past and present projects have explored historical orchestrations of air and sky as expanded moving image displays (cloud-gazing practices, fog projection), the role of breeze and stimmung in classical film theory, as well as the “ambient” structuring of data networks and screens in contemporary media space.
Amaru Tejeda, University of California, Santa Barbara
Amaru Tejeda is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include Latinx media, environmental media, and media industry studies. His current research on the cassette tape and its history as a pop cultural object examines the format from the intersection of these lines of inquiry, focusing especially on the political ambivalence of the format’s resurgence in the contemporary moment. Amaru is a member of the Media Fields Journal Editorial Collective.
Will Tamura, Columbia University
Will Tamura is an MA candidate in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He is a graduate of the University California, Berkeley and received bachelor degrees in Film and Political Science. His Senior Honors Thesis entitled “Boogeyman or Evil Child: Serialized Uncertainties and Postmodern Conditions in the Halloween Franchise” explores the boundaries of modern and postmodern horror through a specific franchise and analyzes their relationship outside of a historic model. He is currently researching YouTube celebritydom and the cycles it has formed.
Rachel Thompson, MIT
Rachel Thompson is currently a master’s student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she researches the relationship between mass media and mass incarceration in the United States, from made-in-prison podcasts to exploitative reality television. Before joining CMS, Rachel earned her bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and Comparative Literature from Harvard University and worked in Boston-area art museums.
Ramna Walia, University of Texas at Austin
Ramna Walia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her MPhil in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she worked on popular Bombay film remakes. She is currently working on the spatialized material history of inter-regional mobility networks of video and digital productions in India. She has published her work in Bioscope, Synoptique, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include South Asia, video cultures, informal media, low genres, creative labor, technology, and film recycling and remakes.
Tony Wei Ling, University of California, Los Angeles
Tony Wei Ling (he/they) studies contemporary literature, comics, and new media in the UCLA English Department, and has a particular interest in Internet-based publication and distributions of marginalized writing / games / comics. They are a fiction editor at Nat. Brut.
Shuyi Xiong, Columbia University
Shuyi Xiong is a second-year M.A. candidate in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. As a fledgling film scholar, she is primarily engaged in film-philosophy, philosophy of technics, media archaeology and infrastructure, and documentary theory. She is currently working on her M.A. thesis on “atmospheric image” that probes into nowadays digital image and projects it into the image of the future that is characterized as contingent and ephemeral, which stands between the visible and invisible, sensible and non-sensible, thought and non-thought.
Jing Xian Yang, University of Southern California
Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang is a first year Masters of Arts student in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the University of Southern California. Her research interests involve new media and fan cultures, specifically focusing on how media narrative forms influence audience participation.
Andrea Avidad is an adjunct lecturer at the Communication Arts & Sciences department at the Bronx Community College. She currently teaches Intercultural Communication and World Cinema. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, she finished her MA in Media Studies at The New School in New York City. She is interested in ‘marginal’ cinematic practices which challenge traditional language and mainstream modes of production.
Rachel Julia Engler, Columbia University
Rachel Julia Engler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and a graduate fellow of the university’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Samantha Freeman, Northwestern University
Samantha Freeman is a PhD candidate from Northwestern’s Screen Cultures program. Her dissertation examines depictions of sexual violence in contemporary American television series. Her work aims to understand how serialized rape narratives operate under specifically gendered and racialized cultural logics in our contemporary moment which has seen a recent proliferation in these types of stories. She received her BA in Film and Media from the University of California Berkeley and an MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern.
Sophie Gilmore, Harvard University
Sophie Gilmore is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, with research interests in digital media, film (especially Hollywood), popular culture, and HP Lovecraft. She has an MA in art history from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and is a published critic of contemporary art.
Brett Kashmere, University of California, Santa Cruz
Brett Kashmere is a media artist, historian, curator, and doctoral student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also the founding editor of INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media. His writing on experimental cinema, sports media, moving image art, and alternative film exhibition has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal, PUBLIC, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Senses of Cinema, The Films of Jack Chambers, Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, and Coming Down the Mountain: Rethinking the 1972 Summit Series.
Yu Jin Jeong, University of Southern California
Yu Jin Jeong is a first-year student pursuing a masters degree in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts. She received a bachelor’s degree in media studies and economics from University of California, Berkeley with a minor in History of Art. She is interested in global cinema and musical films.
Jason LaRiviere, New York University
Jason LaRiviere is currently completing his PhD in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His writing has appeared in boundary 2, Parrhesia, e-flux, The Brooklyn Rail, and is forthcoming in the collection Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History. His current project considers compression as a technical process and philosophical concept.
Jasper Lauderdale, New York University
Jasper Lauderdale is a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he studies the interplay between race, gender, sexuality, and temporality in radical speculative art. Jasper trained as a documentary filmmaker and editor at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and his work for such artists as Lydie Diakhaté, Amie Siegel, and David Hammons has appeared at the 56th Venice Biennale, the 23rd New York African Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Dia:Chelsea, and Dak’art 2018.
Victoria Le-Sweatman, University of Iowa
Originally trained as a poet and literary scholar at the University of Michigan and Brown University, Victoria Le-Sweatman is currently pursuing her MA in Film Studies at the University of Iowa.
Catherine Martin, Boston University
Catherine Martin is a PhD candidate in Boston University’s American and New England Studies Program. Her research focuses on representations of women in radio and television crime programs, with a focus on cultural depictions of women’s labor between World War II and the emergence of Second Wave Feminism. Her work has appeared in The Velvet Light Trap and Radio Journal.
Laurel McLaughlin, Bryn Mawr College
Laurel McLaughlin is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, working with Professor Homay King. Her dissertation traces the strategies of “migratory aesthetics” in the work of contemporary feminist performance artists working in the United States from the 1960s to present. She has presented her research at The University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and Georgia State University. Alongside such research, Laurel has worked at several art institutions, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Slought Foundation, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. She has co-curated the exhibitions, Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms at Bryn Mawr College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA); SWARM. (featuring the work of Didier William and Nestor Armando Gil) at PAFA; and Infinite Spaces: Rediscovering PAFA’s Permanent Collection, in addition to working as a PAFA curatorial assistant on the exhibitions Nick Cave: Rescue and the current retrospective, Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, among others. Most recently, she worked on the exhibition Camp Pause, by artist Tania El Khoury and developed a series of programs and Symposium in conjunction with the artist’s residency entitled, ear-whispered, this fall as a Bryn Mawr College Ridgway Curatorial Fellow.
Erin Nunoda, University of Toronto
Erin Nunoda is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. She is interested in sexual ethics, public space and political aesthetics, with a particular focus on queer sociality and its interactions with cinematic form.
Colin Ross, Independent Scholar
Colin Ross is an art historian and interdisciplinary curator specializing in the politics of vision with particular attention to the 20th and 21st centuries. Colin received his Master’s in History of Art from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s magna cum laude, also in Art History, from Columbia University. Throughout both degrees, he specialized in art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with a focus on photography and particular attention to conflicts at the intersection of culture, technology, and politics. Over the past eight years, he has paired my academic and writing pursuits with developing a museum career. To date, he has assisted with seven museum exhibitions or installations, researched for five museum catalogues, and helped plan and produce numerous public programs. Colin has published art historical essays in both English and Spanish (in which he is fluent), including a contribution on Edward Hopper to the Ashmolean Museum’s America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper exhibition catalogue. This winter he will be presenting, and later publishing, a paper on artist Bruce Conner at an interdisciplinary conference held by the Stavanger Art Museum and the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Alicia Roy, University of California, Berkeley
Alicia Roy is a doctoral candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of German, with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media. Her dissertation research is concerned with issues of authorship and intellectual property in early 20th century Germany. She is a member of the Berkeley-Tübingen-Vienna-Harvard working group “The Emergence of German Modernity,” co-director of the student professionalization group Beyond Academia, and lover of yoga and cat videos.
Diana Ryu, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Diana Ryu is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Often beginning with institutional or personal archives, her research, writing, and studio practice in filmmaking has been informed by how the circulation of images and stories of the past is collected and preserved over time to continuously render (trans)national memory and identity. With her experience working at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Soul Art Space in South Korea, various film festivals, and non-profit organizations, she has been able to engage in dialogues with scholars, artists, filmmakers from various backgrounds and interests. More recently, she has been actively involved with film programming through organizations such as Nightingale Cinema (leading microcinema in Chicago), Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (gallery in Chicago), and ExTV (SAIC’s student-run broadcasting organization). She is particularly committed to providing a platform for filmmakers working with analog equipment and unconventional filmmaking processes that move away from the homogenous canonization of film.
Caufield Schnug, Harvard University
Caufield Schnug is a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His research interests tend to circulate around questions of space, media, affect, and aesthetics. More to the point, most of his work deals with the material and multi-medial construction of atmosphere and ambience in relation to visual culture. Past and present projects have explored historical orchestrations of air and sky as expanded moving image displays (cloud-gazing practices, fog projection), the role of breeze and stimmung in classical film theory, as well as the “ambient” structuring of data networks and screens in contemporary media space.
Amaru Tejeda, University of California, Santa Barbara
Amaru Tejeda is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include Latinx media, environmental media, and media industry studies. His current research on the cassette tape and its history as a pop cultural object examines the format from the intersection of these lines of inquiry, focusing especially on the political ambivalence of the format’s resurgence in the contemporary moment. Amaru is a member of the Media Fields Journal Editorial Collective.
Will Tamura, Columbia University
Will Tamura is an MA candidate in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He is a graduate of the University California, Berkeley and received bachelor degrees in Film and Political Science. His Senior Honors Thesis entitled “Boogeyman or Evil Child: Serialized Uncertainties and Postmodern Conditions in the Halloween Franchise” explores the boundaries of modern and postmodern horror through a specific franchise and analyzes their relationship outside of a historic model. He is currently researching YouTube celebritydom and the cycles it has formed.
Rachel Thompson, MIT
Rachel Thompson is currently a master’s student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she researches the relationship between mass media and mass incarceration in the United States, from made-in-prison podcasts to exploitative reality television. Before joining CMS, Rachel earned her bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and Comparative Literature from Harvard University and worked in Boston-area art museums.
Ramna Walia, University of Texas at Austin
Ramna Walia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her MPhil in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she worked on popular Bombay film remakes. She is currently working on the spatialized material history of inter-regional mobility networks of video and digital productions in India. She has published her work in Bioscope, Synoptique, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include South Asia, video cultures, informal media, low genres, creative labor, technology, and film recycling and remakes.
Tony Wei Ling, University of California, Los Angeles
Tony Wei Ling (he/they) studies contemporary literature, comics, and new media in the UCLA English Department, and has a particular interest in Internet-based publication and distributions of marginalized writing / games / comics. They are a fiction editor at Nat. Brut.
Shuyi Xiong, Columbia University
Shuyi Xiong is a second-year M.A. candidate in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. As a fledgling film scholar, she is primarily engaged in film-philosophy, philosophy of technics, media archaeology and infrastructure, and documentary theory. She is currently working on her M.A. thesis on “atmospheric image” that probes into nowadays digital image and projects it into the image of the future that is characterized as contingent and ephemeral, which stands between the visible and invisible, sensible and non-sensible, thought and non-thought.
Jing Xian Yang, University of Southern California
Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang is a first year Masters of Arts student in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the University of Southern California. Her research interests involve new media and fan cultures, specifically focusing on how media narrative forms influence audience participation.
ORGANIZERS
Harry Burson, University of California, Berkeley
Harry Burson is a PhD candidate in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the history and theory of stereophonic sound, immersive media, virtual reality, and sound art. He currently co-runs the Townsend Center working group on Sound Studies at Berkeley. He holds an M.A. in Film and Media from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in English from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from Truman State University where he studied English, Communication, and Music.
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier, University of California, Berkeley
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is a PhD candidate in the department of film and media at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her research focusses on temporality and new media. Specifically her dissertation concerns the loop as a persistent temporal structure for moving images at moments of technological emergence, from 18th optical toys, through the avant-garde of the early 20th century, to post-war video art and early computer animation, to gallery films and networked digital images. Prior to her studies at Berkeley she worked in documentary film production as a researcher, grant writer, and associate producer.
Tory Jeffay, University of California, Berkeley
Tory Jeffay is a PhD student in Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in New Media. Her research centers on the intersection of nonfiction media and technology within the contexts of entertainment, journalism, and the law. Before coming to Berkeley she worked as an editor of documentary films. She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University.
Alina Predescu, University of California, Berkeley
Alina Predescu is a PhD candidate in Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of the filmic interview as a form of social encounter in Polish documentary films made between the 1960s -1980s. Her broader interests include the evolution of the concept of “documentary film”, and forms of documentary/non-fictional expressions reflecting the socio-political and cultural transformations in Eastern Europe. She holds an M.A. in Film Studies from San Francisco State University, a B.A. in Audiovisual Communications from National University of Theater and Film “I. L. Caragiale” in Bucharest, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest.
Harry Burson is a PhD candidate in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the history and theory of stereophonic sound, immersive media, virtual reality, and sound art. He currently co-runs the Townsend Center working group on Sound Studies at Berkeley. He holds an M.A. in Film and Media from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in English from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from Truman State University where he studied English, Communication, and Music.
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier, University of California, Berkeley
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is a PhD candidate in the department of film and media at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her research focusses on temporality and new media. Specifically her dissertation concerns the loop as a persistent temporal structure for moving images at moments of technological emergence, from 18th optical toys, through the avant-garde of the early 20th century, to post-war video art and early computer animation, to gallery films and networked digital images. Prior to her studies at Berkeley she worked in documentary film production as a researcher, grant writer, and associate producer.
Tory Jeffay, University of California, Berkeley
Tory Jeffay is a PhD student in Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in New Media. Her research centers on the intersection of nonfiction media and technology within the contexts of entertainment, journalism, and the law. Before coming to Berkeley she worked as an editor of documentary films. She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University.
Alina Predescu, University of California, Berkeley
Alina Predescu is a PhD candidate in Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of the filmic interview as a form of social encounter in Polish documentary films made between the 1960s -1980s. Her broader interests include the evolution of the concept of “documentary film”, and forms of documentary/non-fictional expressions reflecting the socio-political and cultural transformations in Eastern Europe. She holds an M.A. in Film Studies from San Francisco State University, a B.A. in Audiovisual Communications from National University of Theater and Film “I. L. Caragiale” in Bucharest, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest.