Derek was a freelance cinematographer and a lecturer in film, video and digital media production at Queen's from 1976 to 2015, teaching the Fundamentals of Production regularly and in some years Advanced Production or Video and Multimedia. He created the Film and Media Department's website in 1995 and maintained it until 2015, and served on the University's Instructional Technology Advisory Committee, Web Editorial Board, Radio Policy Board, and Campus Planning Committee. 

Thea Fitz-James is a theatre academic and practitioner. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from York University and is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Queen’s University, teaching theatre theory, theatre administration, fringe theatre, performance art, and performance studies. Her current creative and academic work looks at Fringe Theatre, concepts of play in creative research, and the materiality of the body in performance. She’s developed two solo shows deconstructing contemporary feminist stereotypes, which have toured the Fringe circuit internationally. She is a white, queer, ‘Mad’, cis-gendered settler.

Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. Prior to joining Queen’s University, she was Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and affiliated faculty in the Center for Global Asia. She also taught at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and worked as the coordinator and researcher in the Global Emergent Media Lab.

Her research interests center on politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines these textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through the situated experience of China but gradually expanding to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia and the Global South. Her work appeared in peer-review journals such as Asiascape: Digital Asia, Culture Machine, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Environmental Media. In the past, she has led curatorial projects such as “Elemental Relations: Thinking Ecologically through Artist Film and Video” (2021) and “China Now: Independent Visions” (2016).

Her current book project Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making, between the mid-twentieth century and the present day. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrates natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower and maritime signal sovereignty.

She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in Southern China. Her next research aims to theorize the transboundary linkages of Asia through different forms of aquatic mediation, such as vernacular imagination of water and the emerging blue carbon economy.

Selected Publications:

• “Crash Landing on the Philippines: Transnational Korean Dramas and Internet Infrastructure Desires” (Under review with Television and New Media)

• “Teaching with Video: A Global Media Form and Interfaces of Global Encounters,” Teaching Dossier on Teaching the Global in Media Studies. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2022)

• “Bitcoin’s Ethnic Shadow and Echoes.” Art Review of Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, by Liu Chuang. Journal for Environmental Media 2, no. 2, 2021.

• “Island Fever: Videated Populism and Disputed Geographies at Sea.” Culture Machine 19, 2020. (Special issue on “Media Populism”)

• “Under the Dome: Un-engineering Digital Capture in China’s Smog.” In Asiascape: Digital Asia 4, no. 1-2, 2017.

Kelly O’Dette is the new Film and Media Department Technician.  Kelly has worked as editor in film and television in Toronto for the past 10 years.  She has experience with various genres such as comedy and documentary.  She also worked as a post-production supervisor overseeing project workflow and delivery.  Kelly holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from Western University.