Faculty

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.

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

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. 

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.  

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.

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.

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