Supervisor
Film and Media
Arts and Science
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts Room 338
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.
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.
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.
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.
Film and Media
Arts and Science
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts Room 341
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.
In 2020, I published A Companion to Federico Fellini (co-edited, Wiley Blackwell, 2022) and Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern (single-authored, Intellect/University of Chicago Press). I also provided a Criterion Collection audio commentary for Fellini’s Il Bidone and a keynote address for an international Fellini conference at the University of Toronto. In 2021, I recorded a 60-minute “Masterclass” on Fellini for the Cineteca di Rimini and Italian Foreign Affairs and delivered a keynote address on Fellini and James Hillman at a virtual conference originating from Rimini. I just finished co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media devoted principally to noted screenwrither Tonino Guerra and translated an Italian film script for a feature-length Hollywood movie slated to go into production this fall (2022). My interests span not just Fellini and Italian cinema but film and postmodernity, ideological criticism, cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, and gender.
https://www.queensu.ca/filmandmedia/frank-burke
Film and Media
Arts and Science
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts Room 337
My work explores the activity of both new and old media systems, and particularly the instances in which its messiness becomes more evident: the fringe genres, precarious objects, and pirate practices. I often resort to forms of Research-Creation through independent curatorial endeavors that engage with experimental and vernacular moving images. My previous projects mobilize subjects such as media façades, hyper-ephemeral video, 3D printing and scanning, videogame emulation, VR, and generative coding. As an author, I have published on the subjects of image, space, and technology. My most recent books are the monograph "Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology" (Amsterdam University, 2019) and the edited collection “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (Oxford University, 2020). I am also the co-coordinator of the Besides the Screen research network and festival. Currently, I am working on an exhibition project about virtual museums and on a monograph about digital replicas and cultural heritage.
Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for Queen's Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at Queen’s University. Until 2000 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A book of essays and scripts was published in 2005: Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins, ed. A. J. Paterson, YYZ Books, Toronto; 2005; 254 pp.
I have an ongoing interest in Canadian film, both in terms of industry and culture. Some of my recent research considers the place of auteurs, co-productions, and festivals in Canadian film culture. Recent work includes “Toronto on Screen,” a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (Marchessault and Straw eds., 2018), and a forthcoming chapter on Xavier Dolan. Another strand of my research pertains to the emergence of event cinema and the intersections of film and performance in ‘live cinema.’ My research on event cinema is forthcoming in Sounds of Fury: Mapping the Rockumentary (Iverson and MacKenzie eds., 2020). I am also currently co-editing a volume on film, performance and intermediality, forthcoming in 2021. Finally, I have a longstanding interest in geographical approaches to film and media, especially concerning cinema and urbanism. My current book project brings together geography and film theory in order to investigate how contemporary filmmakers and artists have responded to the forces of globalization and localization. I am especially interested in supervising projects on aspects of Canadian film and television; theories and histories of intermediality, liveness, and performance; national cinemas; and projects about film and media geographies.
https://www.queensu.ca/filmandmedia/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff-bios/ian-robinson
I am working on cultures of urban mobility and community, particularly those that resist petrocultures and further equity. My collaborative documentary Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories is part of this research. Currently preparing a monograph about several global cities, I am particularly interested in how motion shapes how we continuously become in the world. My larger published works are Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary and the co-edited anthologies Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin and Christa Wolf A Companion. I also developed and run an etandem platform for language learning www.LinguaeLive.ca. I did my PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford. At Berkeley, the Weimar film specialist Anton Kaes and Frankfurt School and Habermas expert Robert Holub were my advisors. I typically approach narrative fiction and documentary by triangulating historicization/contextualization, theory, and attention to the language of the artistic text; I would be particularly amenable to working with students who find this approach productive.
http://www.queensu.ca/llcu/german/people/jennifer-hosek
Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation.