*In the order of presentation
Éloïse Thompson-Tremblay (MA in Cinema Studies, NYU)
After completing a B.F.A. from Concordia University in Art History and Film Studies, Éloïse Thompson-Tremblay is now pursuing a Masters degree in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Apart from her propensity to spend a lot of time doing trivia, she spends most of her time watching films and conducting research revolving around the exploration of power dynamics as it pertains to sex and gender, particularly in American and British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s.
Shayna Maci Warner (MA in Cinema Studies, NYU)
Shayna Maci Warner is a first year Cinema Studies MA (BA in World Arts and Cultures, UCLA) with an eventual goal of producing, programming and preserving queer film and television. She is a 2018 GLAAD Rising Star, and has been featured in teenVogue, the Advocate, and Bi+ Women Quarterly for her filmmaking and journalism. She is also an Assistant Programmer for Outfest, the Trans Filmmaking Fellowship Coordinator for Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, and a pretty good roller skater.
You Wu (MA in Cinema Studies, NYU)
You Wu is a second-year cinema studies graduate student in New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He received a bachelor’s degree in communication arts and computer science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is interested in East Asian cinema, Sinophone cinema, queer cinema, Buddhist cinema, new media, and digital cinema. He is also an experimental filmmaker as well as a curator for a Chinese Film Festival in New York.
Matthias Mushinski (PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia Univ.)
Matthias Mushinski is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. He completed his MA in Film Studies at Columbia University and his master’s thesis was published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media in 2017. His doctoral research examines the critical reception of free jazz musicians such as Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in Paris during the late 1960s and the unrecognized influence of Amiri Baraka on the foundations of political film theory. He hosts a monthly free jazz radio show titled “Out from Outside” on n10.as in Montréal.
Ekin Erkan (MA in Film and Media Studies, Columbia Univ.)
I, Ekin Erkan, am a first-year MA graduate student at Columbia University’s Film and Media Studies program and a freelance writer for the art and criticism journal AEQAI. As a Turkish immigrant with interests in socio-politically radical media and film, much of my research examines cultural instability and the avant-garde, analyzing filmic or visual artifact corollaries. My writing in new media theory synthesizes deconstructions of regimes of power, examining ontological shifts in biopower, postmodernity, and communicative capitalism. My social engagement with film instrumentalizes visual essays and ethnography/ethnofiction documentaries to serve as models to articulate the genealogy of contemporaneous Phenomena.
Keisha Knight (PhD in Film and Visual Studies, Harvard Univ.)
Keisha Knight is film curator and PhD candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Keisha’s research interests include Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, African & African-American Cinema, and Critical Media Practice. Keisha holds an MA in Media Studies from Pratt Institute and a BA in Comparative Religion from Barnard College. Keisha is co-founder of Sentient.Art.Film a creative distribution initiative based in NYC.
Chae Park (MA in Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Chae Park is a second year M.A. student at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Cinema and Media Studies Division. Her research interest is essay film in relation to neoliberalism. She has presented in PCA/ACA annual conference, and her review of Essays on the Essay Film (Alter and Corrigan, 2017) has been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Hannah Soebbing (MA in Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Hannah Soebbing is currently an MA student in Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on theories of spectatorship and issues of space and place in visual culture, with a particular attention to inscriptions and depictions of travel in nonfiction film and television.
Jessie Yao (M.P.S., Parsons the New School)
Jessie Yao is a M.P.S. student at Parsons the New School, Communication Design. Her work explores personal and cultural identity through graphic design, with a focus on contemporary Chinese culture. See more of her work at jessieyao.com.
Shuyi Xiong (MA in Film and Media Studies, Columbia Univ.)
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 “the 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.
Gabrielle Marovavy Rajerison (Ph.D student, Univ. of Pittsburgh)
Gabrielle Marovavy Rajerison is a writer and graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.
Jennifer Yu Jin Jeong (MA in Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
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.
Ayanna Serenity Dozier (PhD in Communication Studies & Gender Studies, McGill Univ.)
Ayanna Dozier is a PhD communication studies and gender studies candidate at McGill University, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum, and a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney ISP. She is a contemporary art curator, filmmaker, performance artist, and theorist who writes about Black feminist philosophy, experimental cinema, and art. Selected writings have appeared in the journals Cléo, Feminist Media Histories, and Feminist Media Studies.
Toma Peiu (PhD in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices, Univ. of Colorado Boulder)
Toma Peiu is a filmmaker, visual artist, and media scholar, presently pursuing a PhD in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is also a fellow of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School University in New York, and a bachelor’s in Screenwriting and Film Studies from The National University of Dramatic Arts and Film in Bucharest, Romania. Toma’s work as a writer and visual artist confounds with his scholarly interests in identifying new modes of expression by engaging technology of various generations and theory inhabiting liminal disciplinary spaces across the arts and (social) sciences. His moving image works resulted from a long-term collaboration with filmmaker and educator Luiza Parvu, have been exhibited in over 100 venues on four continents.
Christian Rossipal (PhD in Cinema Studies, NYU)
Christian Rossipal is a PhD student in Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (NYU). He is also part of the Culture and Media Certificate Program at NYU’s Anthropology Department. His research interests include media and migration, biopolitics, and critical race theory. He is part of the artist-activist collective Noncitizen and is currently finishing a Routledge anthology book chapter on their new project, The Noncitizen Archive.
Megan Hoetger (PhD in Performance Studies, UC Berkeley)
Megan Hoetger is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Film. Currently, she is a Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at Universiteit Gent, Belgium. Her research tracks the establishment of transnational underground networks for the distribution and exhibition of underground cinema and performance in the Cold War period, and their on-going importance in contemporary global conditions.
Darja Filippova (PhD in Comparative Literature, Princeton Univ.)
Originally from Tallinn, Estonia, I hold a BA from Smith College, an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from The Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in History and Religion from Central European University. I am a 3nd year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature in Princeton University and I work on political performance art in post-socialist space, blasphemy and ways of seeing religious offence. This paper is an extension of my interest in film and visuality: it was developed in the seminar Inverse Visuality with Prof. Erin Huang (Princeton 2017).
Devon Narine-Singh (BFA in Filmmaking, SUNY Purchase)
Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator currently pursuing a BFA in Filmmaking at SUNY Purchase. He has curated several screenings for The Film-Makers’ Coop, where he is one of the programmers for their festival New Year, New Works. As a filmmaker his works have screened at The New School, The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and UltraCinema.
Christina Aislinn Chalmers (PhD in Comparative Literature, NYU)
Christina Chalmers is a PhD candidate in NYU’s Comparative Literature program. She studies documentary aesthetics and militant film, in relation to philosophies of history and of praxis in Italian, Anglophone and Lusophone contexts. She is also a poet and filmmaker, and her short film Notes on Capture was shown at the Goldsmiths November Film Festival in London in 2018.
The Re/active Image 