Faculty

Dr. Mél Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast (thedatafix.net) and Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) (environmentalmedialab.com). As of 2024, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University. Her research focuses on data infrastructure, extractive AI, and genomic media, each understood from within the contexts of planetary catastrophe and collective anxieties about the future. For more: http://melhogan.com.

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

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

Areas of research interest include contemporary art and aesthetic theory, research-creation, experimental media, installation, social practice and performance art, curatorial practice/studies, institutional critique and visual and popular cultures. Supervisory fields are curatorial practice/studies and contemporary art.

https://agnes.queensu.ca/?s=sunny%20kerr&f=exhibition

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

Dr Qanita Lilla is a South African curator, researcher and writer with a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University. She is currently Associate Curator, Arts of Africa at Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queens University situated on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. At Agnes, Qanita cares for the Lang Collection of African Art, one of the largest collections of its kind in Canada. She is interested the life and after-life of objects in collections, representations of racialised minorities and depictions of traumatic histories. Qanita is the curator of With Opened Mouths and the associated podcast. She has published in various peer-reviewed publications and has also contributed book chapters to anthologies.

Cinema and media arts areas include gendered spaces and the city, women’s and Canadian cinemas,  and Cuban cinema and visual culture; decolonial practice; media archives and their remediation, social ecology of vulnerable media, collectives and collections; curatorial projects; media arts artists’ groups and artist-run centres.

After completing my PhD in Communications at McGill University, I went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to Queen’s, I taught at universities in the UK and Canada. At Queen’s, I have taught courses on Classical Hollywood cinemas; Arctic transnational cinemas; transnational European cinemas; film manifestos; film and media theory; Culture and Technology; and popular music and cultural studies, among others.

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.

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

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.  

Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation.