PhD Student
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michele Lawson is an internationally recognized journalist and social justice media producer. Since graduating from Queen’s University with a BAH in Film, she has worked primarily in the charitable sector advocating on behalf of highly vulnerable individuals. As an MA student, she is interested in the ethics of representation and consent as it pertains to engaging those with lived experience in social justice media projects and programs. Her current focus includes building a case for supporting social change to help abandoned children in Muskoka by employing community-based participatory research (CBPR).
Neven Lochhead is an artist, curator, educator and PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program. Prior to beginning his degree at Queen’s in 2020, he worked as Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre from 2017-2019. At SAW, he founded and operated Knot Project Space – a discursive venue through which he engaged local, national, and international artists to present a series of interrelated exhibitions, performances, lectures, learning contexts, residency platforms and off-site public art projects. Central to his curatorial practice and PhD research methodology is a pursuit of how exhibition-making can act as a tool for creating novel forms of collective inquiry, and ultimately generate critical trajectories that directly affect an organisation’s operational structures and imaginative capacities.
As an artist, he often works collaboratively with other artists, writers, and theorists, including the artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he produced various works as a filmmaker from 2017-2022, which were presented at Toronto Biennial of Art, SFMOMA, Tate Modern and other institutions. His solo exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, From the vibe out, took shape as an video installation, four-part radio program, music album, online performance and learning platform. The exhibition explored a quasi-fictional archive of ‘grey literature’ belonging to an imagined artist-led research institute situated in downtown Kingston.
As an educator, through a Teaching Fellowship at Queen’s in 2021 he created an undergraduate course, Sound and Synthesis, for the Department of Film and Media, which attends to sound as an integral but often overlooked aspect of film and video production and reception. In 2022, Lochhead was awarded a grant from Queen’s University Library to develop his course into an Open Educational Resource.
Peggy is an animator, illustrator, and teaching artist. After studying digital design at Pratt Institute, she gained professional experience in post-production, creating animation and special effects for film and television. An interest in film and video festivals led to a position in the education department at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. She has training in a variety of museum pedagogies and has created accessible experiences with art & media for all ages and abilities. These learning environments support intergenerational fun and learning outside of the classroom and include installations, obstacle courses, collaborative art projects and events in museums and arboretums. Most recently, she is researching and making craft-based animation and optical toys. Her research connects early media technologies and current theories of art education, with a particular interest in creating programs that encourage slow looking and extended conversations.
Vince Ha is a PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. His research centers on two core themes: diasporic identities and queer archival methods. Currently, he is investigating transnational media and its relationship with queer diasporic sociality, with special attention to homoerotic representation in Asian cinema.