People Directory

Adam Cook is a film critic, curator, and scholar. Outside of the academy, his experience as a writer and film programmer spans over a decade. Within the academy, Cook’s research seeks to find connective tissue between reductive strands of theory and a revitalized aesthetics centred on formalism.

I am a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and videographer, born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. I hold a Master’s degree in Film Production from York University where I developed my thesis project Hidden Gods. Besides fiction films I produced documentaries (Making Sones and Memories) and have been editor of some documentary projects. My most recent collaboration work Women Building Peace in Africa was awarded best documentary at the Silverwave Film Festival 2016.  I also edited episodes of the TV series Battle Scars, about Canadian Military in times of peace and war.

Ahmed is an award-winning filmmaker, film scholar, and film programmer. His career spans over 19 years where he has made numerous shorts and features that played myriad international film festivals and picked several prestigious awards. Nour’s area of expertise comprises screenwriting, producing, video-editing, and directing. His work varies between experimental, documentary, and fiction films. However, his particular interest is in hybrid nonfiction filmmaking.

Alex Jansen is a creative entrepreneur with more than 20 years’ experience in the film & media industry and a passion for community development.

Jansen has spent more than a decade running his own successful multimedia production company, Pop Sandbox. He has produced award-winning films, video games, graphic novels and interactive experiences, featured at the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Hot Docs, the Tokyo Game Show, Indiecade and PAX East among others.  Visit: www.popsandbox.com

As a media scholar working at the intersections of race, queer, and feminist studies, my research focuses on how media performances define and defy conceptions of Asian/Asian diasporic bodies. Drawing on transnational cultural histories, I theorize resistance, complicity, and ambivalence in new border crossings facilitated by digital media. I am interested in the performance of media technologies. As such, my scholarship traverses the areas of digital media, popular culture, and media installation. My research seeks to establish a multidirectional relationship between medium and content. That is, I am interested how tangible technological objects and their processes, embodied practices around media technologies, and the content communicated through media work together. In the digital age, the ideas of media as immaterial, virtual, and transcendent dominate. My work pushes against this impulse by grounding the body, the material, and the haptic.

https://www.queensu.ca/filmandmedia/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff-bios/ali-na

I am the Chief Curator/Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. My curatorial approach involves resituating visual and material cultures through a feminist lens and innovations in interpretive display. Areas of research include women artists, artistic groups, regional scenes, collecting histories and intersections of art and craft.

https://agnes.queensu.ca/?s=Alicia+Boutilier&f=all

Amit is a Canadian-Israeli award-winning documentary film and interactive media producer. Her award-winning works include Sentenced to Marriage, Checkpoint, Between Two Notes, Love Letters to the Future and The Guantanamo Trap. Breuer received the prestigious Israeli Arts Council Award for cinema art recognizing her body of work’s significant contribution to domestic documentary cinema as well as her founding role in the Noga Communications Documentary Art Channel. She is a three-time winner of the Israeli Academy Award (1993, 1995, 1999) a recipient of the Doc-Aviv Best Film Award (2001), the prestigious Gold Fipa Award (2003), the Joris Ivens Award (2003), as well as the International Festival of Film and Art FIFA Award for best reportage in 2007, a Gemini, two Webbys, and more.

Austin Benson is a MA Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies student and former Queen's Film & Media undergrad. His research interests are in experimental and narrative production as well as film theory, history and criticism. For his Film 460 creative thesis he wrote a novel which he is now redrafting and created a work based on the text. He had a short film screened at KCFF '18 and as a writer has had publications in literary journals. Currently he is intent on taking his interests further in the 2019-2020 academic session to enhance the scope and style of his experimental media works, films and writings.

Canadian film and television, and in 2001 I started offering a senior-level seminar in film authorship that concentrates on the work of Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles. I've also been considering issues of film authorship in relation to my current research for a professional biography of Phillip Borsos (1953-1995), director of The Grey Fox, One Magic Christmas, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, and several other short and feature-length films. In addition to this work on Canadian film, I've devoted attention to a couple of other areas. The new edition of Television: Critical Methods and Applications, by Jeremy Butler, includes my revised chapter, "Music Television," which uses Lauryn Hill's Everything is Everything for a sample analysis. 

Brandon Hocura is a sound artist, filmmaker, writer, and archivist. He is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. His recent research areas include iterative sound, autonomous distribution networks, visual & sound poetry, material histories, rogue archives, archipelagic theory, and diasporic traditions. 

Cam is the Film and Media Technician working in the equipment room at the Isabel Bader Center for the Performing Arts. Cam helps our students navigate the world of equipment, cameras, and all related technical needs.

Clarke Mackey has been teaching in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University for 26 years. Before that he taught at York University and Sheridan College of Art and Design.

Clarke is an accomplished media producer. He has worked as a director, cinematographer, editor, producer or writer on over 50 film, television and new media projects. Many have won awards and critical acclaim. His first feature film, The Only Thing You Know (1971), won two Canadian Film Awards (now called Genies) including the Best Actress award. This film is considered by many critics to be an important film in the early development of independent cinema in this country.

Areas of research and supervisory interest include: Visual and popular cultures; genre cinemas; horror films & monster movies; death studies; feminist-queer-trans histories of Classical Hollywood; fan-based reading practices; superhero comic books; histories of Eugenic medicine and criminality in the West; curricular design and pedagogical strategies.

Danae Elon is an award winning documentary filmmaker, writer, producer and cinematographer.  A  recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim scholarship for those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts”.  Danae’s films have won numerous awards at international film festivals such as Tribeca, Doker, Haifa, Doc Aviv, RIDM and others. She is a two time Sundance Institute Fellow and has received grants from the New Foundation for Film and TV, The Makor foundation, The Quebec Art Council, Canada Art Council, Sodec and Canada Media Fund.

After graduating from Queen’s University with a Major in Sociology and a Minor in Film, Daniel transitioned to a Masters program in Cultural Studies, where he wrote his thesis “Hays Gone By: The Proto-Feminism of Pre-Code Hollywood and the Films of Mae West”. As an aspiring PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Daniel is continuing his studies of transgression within Hollywood cinema, specifically as it relates to the Hollywood Production Code. Outside of the classroom, Daniel also makes video essays analyzing art-house cinema and popular film on YouTube under the name Eyebrow Cinema.

Darshana's research focuses on the authentic representation of LGBTQ community and their issues in Indian Parallel/Avant-garde Cinema, it’s audience reception and possible solutions for better portrayal of the community in Indian cinema.

Denise is the Departmental Administrator for the Department of Film and Media at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Her duties include both financial and administrative tasks involving students, faculty and the public.

My Research-Creation work centres on making visible and legible obfuscated urban histories. In the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here we digitally reinscribed the Palestinians who were expelled during the 1948 war onto their neighborhoods and homes. In The Belle Park Project we look at environmental and colonial violence, but also re-naturalization, abundance and resilience in a Kingston city park that used to be a landfill. In the past ten years I have primarily worked within participatory and collaborative frameworks (in both my artistic practice and my academic writing). My focus is on interactive and augmented documentary, alongside cultural and other interventions in situ (guided walks, art installations, etc.). 

I am interested in supervising students who work on expansive manifestations of documentary cinema, post and decolonial media practices, anti-extraction culture, feminist methods, and ethics in media. I am also happy to supervise students who work on Middle Eastern cinemas and medias, and students focussed on settler accountability on Turtle Island.  

After graduating from Queen's University with an Undergraduate degree in Film and Media, Emilie Surette has transitioned into the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies MA program. Her research interests include animation, feminist film theory, and aesthetics.