People Directory

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 a filmmaker, video-editor, screenwriter, producer and photographer. He started his career as assistant-director in several feature films, TV Shows and music videos, where he gained valuable experience in the Egyptian main-stream film industry.

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 filmmaker, writer, producer, and archivist. He is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research and reissue work over the last 10 years has helped revive under-known electronic, new-age, gwo ka, disco, soca, pantsula and kwaito artists. In 2017, he directed The Lake Sutra, a short film surveying the influence of the Northern Ontario environment on the work of Canadian musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland. His work intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, and explores the complex relationships between music, landscape, language, technology and culture. His recent research areas include autonomous distribution networks, visual & sound poetry, material histories, rogue archives, living memory, archipelagic thinking, as well as popular & avant-garde music from the Caribbean and its diaspora. As part of the Vulnerable Media Lab team at Queen's University, he is engaged with audio and video preservation, and is helping to build standards and best practices for audio archiving.

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.

I came to Queens because teaching and mentoring students is a vocation. Helping them find their artistic voices is what makes me feel alive. I want to share what has been a life-long path of discovery and passion with a younger generation and give back some of the most fulfilling experiences I have had to those who are going to walk in similar paths or discover new ones. 

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 .  Her last film  A Sister’s Song  won her an Iris award for best cinematography as well as numerous international prizes for best documentary film (Doker) and innovation in Documentary making ( DOc Aviv). Her short Life of a Dog, was selected by CBC Gem as part of the Covid Relief fund for artists from over 4000 submissions. Life of A Dog was a finalist for best documentary at Gala Quebec Iris awards. Her films Another Road Home 2004, Partly Private 2007, P.S Jerusalem 2015 and The Patriarch’s Room 2017( Best Documentary film Beyond Borders 2021, Best Documentary Toronto Jewish Film Festival, Orpheus Award LA Greek Film Festival) have been showcased at TIFF, Berlinale, Tribeca, IDFA, Hot Docs, Melbourne IFF, Human Rights watch FF, FIPA, Leipzig  and many other international film festivals, they have also been theatrically released in the US and Canada and broadcast on the BBC, ARTE, The Sundance Channel,  Radio Canada, YLE Finland, TV2 Denmark, HOT and CHANNEL 1 Israel, AL JAZEERA International.   Danae is currently working on two new feature films as well as a Virtual Reality experience supported by the Quebec Art Council, The Canada Art Council,  Sodec and the Canada Media Fund. In addition to her film work, Danae is a cinematographer, a mentor and a curator. She has programmed for The Cinema South Film Festival and is currently selecting films for the on-line VOD platform TENK. 

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. 

Emily Pelstring is full-time faculty in the Department of Film and Media, where her teaching areas include video, performance, sound, animation, experimental media, and music video studies.  Her courses are built around creative exploration and collaboration, and she aims to facilitate a laboratory or workshop environment for students.

Emily Sanders is a first (ish) year PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies. Her research focuses primarily on Canadian film, and investigates the abject within the genre. Other research interests include rural cinemas in Canada; affect theory; aesthetics in film; horror and the monstrous; and film-philosophy. Her (current) favourite film is Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay.