People Directory

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. 

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.  

Edem is a PhD student in the Film and Media Department. She holds a first-class undergraduate degree in Communications and recently completed her Master’s degree researching feminist documentary filmmaking in Ghana. She is a journalist turned documentary filmmaker/photographer, feminist and queer activist from Ghana and has almost a decade of working experience. Edem mostly volunteers/ works in activist spaces providing intersectional multimedia and communications support to activist courses and groups. She comes to film as an activist and is interested in ways in which marginalized populations can use documentary filmmaking to self-represent, and trigger social change. She is a cofounder of, and the Director of the African Grad Students’ at Queen’s Club.

Eman is a documentary filmmaker and film scholar. She studied at the University of Sussex in the UK, where she was awarded the prestigious Cate Haste scholarship, and where she gained her MA in Documentary Filmmaking (with Distinction). Currently, she is studying for a PhD in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on Egyptian first-person documentary films. She has also an ongoing interest in interactive documentary, digital media, film curation and feminist cinema.

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.

My research lies at the intersection of media studies and religious studies. Theoretically, my work draws heavily on critical media studies and several shades of material media analysis, including affect studies, sound culture studies, interface studies, and algorithmic and network culture.

I'm only really curious about why we live: what kinds of faith subtends the mechanics of our day-to-day survival; the manner & the style through which we express our vitality. In the language of the University, I translate this curiosity into such terms as "experiential performance-based research": for my PhD I want to gather a collective of multimodal artists who are interested in spirituality and mystical experience to work at the limits of their practices, and to dissolve their limits into the mutation-structure of the group. Call it a cult but with no centre, no dogma, no direction.

A PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Faten considers herself an activist artist who seeks to contribute to the appreciation of various cultures and acceptance of the others in her own community and around the world. She works with various mediums ranging from handicrafts to digital photography and video to create her sight specific installations.

Frances Leeming is a media artist and animator. Her performance and film projects explore the relationship between gender, technology and consumerism. Her work has been presented and exhibited across Canada, the U.S., Britain and Poland.

Francesca C. DiBona is an MA student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. She holds a BAH in Critical Media Studies and Urban Education from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Working in both textual and essayistic media forms, her work concerns topics of transgression theory, Orientalism, food, and fugitivity, among others.

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

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.  

garykibbins.com

Glenn Gear's practice is grounded in a research creation methodology shaped by Inuit and Indigenous ways of knowing – often employing the use of animation, photo archives, painting, beading, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin. He has worked on projects with the National Film Board of Canada, collaborated with other artists, and created installations, online works, and live video/audio projections that explore the complex relationships between land, animals, history, and archives. 

A growing area within his larger artistic practice is the sharing of his animation knowledge of low-budget and experimental techniques through mentoring opportunities and workshops, often in collaboration with Indigenous youth and first-time filmmakers.

Heather is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program. Her research focuses on found footage horror films, including the cultural history of the genre and themes of surveillance within it. She is also interested in adaptation theory, screenlife horror films, and the interplay between reality and image.

Helga Smallwood is the Graduate Assistant for the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies MA and PhD programs. Helga previously worked with undergraduate students in the Department of Film and Media, in the role of Interim Undergraduate Assistant, and in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, in the role of Interim Student Experience Coordinator. Before coming to Canada in 2020, she worked as a Researcher Development Officer at the University of York (UK), and prior to that has over 10 year’s experience in research and academic administration. 

Hilary Jay is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. Prior to this, she completed her B.A. in Philosophy and Art History at McGill and her M.A. in SCCS at Queen’s in 2022. Her research is engaged with the contemporary relevance of archives, time-based media, and curation. Hilary is also currently a Research Assistant in the Vulnerable Media Lab. 

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