Zoë Druick is Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research considers histories, theories,and trajectories of documentary and reality-based media with an emphasis on their intersection with biopolitical projects. This work has brought her into contact with numerous archives and developed her awareness of their precarity. She is author or editor of five books, including Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (McGill-Queen's) and The Grierson Effect: Documentary’s International Movement (BFI). Current projects include a SSHRC-funded project on the legacies of the NFB's Studio D, the women's studio, and a manuscript on UNESCO's biopolitical media strategies.

Dr. Aceves Sepúlveda’s research bridges the histories of art, media, and technology with gender and women studies, and art and design practice. She is the author of Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (University of Nebraska Press) and several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research-creation projects on feminist media in Latin America, global networks of artistic exchange, aging and activism, and the histories of immersive technologies in the Global South. Currently,  she is working on a book manuscript which explores the work of four Latin American composers working at the intersections of visual and sound art to suggest an alternative history of electronic music and twentieth-century avant-gardes. Her video and sculptural installations that explore the body as a site of cultural and gender inscriptions have been exhibited in Canada, Mexico, France, India, and Chile.

Jessica Jacobson-Konefall is Assistant Professor of Canadian Art and Theory at the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph. Her research interests include Canadian and Indigenous art, Marxist feminism, Critical Theory, Indigenous and critical race theory, and poststructuralist theories. Her current SSHRC Insight Development project focuses on ecological aesthetics in Treaty 1 and Treaty 3 territory (Manitoba/Ontario). She is Collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant Archive/Counter-Archive out of York University, with Anishinaabe artist and cultural worker Angelina Mcleod (Shoal Lake 40 First Nation) and Urban Shaman: Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, working on an art/academic project relating birchbark scrolls with civic/reserve archives. She is working on two book chapters on the relationship between energy "resources" and contemporary arts in Canada, and writing a monograph focused on the art of Rebecca Belmore and other contemporary artists in light of the question: "what does it mean to be here in a good way?" She is a practicing artist.

Julianne Pidduck is associate professor in the Communication department at the Université de Montréal. Her research explores representations of gender and sexuality through the moving image, and more broadly across mediated public discourse. Author of Contemporary Costume Film (2004), she has published widely in Canadian and international academic journals. Her current project, Shadowplay and Afterimages, examines LGBTQ2+ produced film, video, and photography in Montréal from the 1950s until the 1990s as an archive of LGBTQ2+ lives and experience. As part of this project, she recently edited a special section of the online journal Jump Cut, returning to mythic Quebec filmmaker Claude Jutra in light of the 2016 allegations of pedophilia. Member of the core group of Queer Media Database Canada-Québec Project, she is presently co-curating an installation exploring 1970s Montréal lesbian bar culture and social life entitled, After Hours at Madame Arthur, to take place at Montréal’s Never Apart Centre from June-September 2019.

Laura Horak investigates the history of transgender and gender-nonconforming film and media in the United States and Canada, and the history of sexuality in U.S. and Scandinavian cinema. Supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Horak is researching the history of trans, Two-Spirit, and gender-nonconforming filmmaking in Canada and the United States, and creating a pilot online database to promote these filmmakers.

She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers University Press, 2016), co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014), and Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, January 2019). She also co-edited a special issue of Somatechnics on trans cinematic bodies. She regularly curates film screenings in Canada, Europe, and the United States.

Tamara de Szegheo Lang is Project Manager of the Vulnerable Media Lab and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She holds a doctorate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies from York University. Dr. de Szegheo Lang’s research takes up queer history, community-based archives, visual culture, and the affective relationships between LGBT2Q people and the past. Her publications have appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and the Journal of Homosexuality. Dr. de Szegheo Lang is also active in curatorial and programming roles. She is a member of the programming committee for the Reelout Queer Film Festival in Kingston, a co-programmer of the Born in Frames Screening Series at Queen’s University, and past curatorial committee co-chair of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

My interest for cinema and films in general came from watching old black and white movies with my grandma on PBS on Sunday afternoons. Beyond these old Hollywood narratives, I have grown to love films stemming from all parts of the world. More recently, my research interests have been centered on Quebec cinema (intercultural collaborations), Indigenous films and poetry, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema.  

I am also a member of the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s and lead researcher for the Archive/Counter-Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) working with the Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women and with Québécois filmmaker Marie-Hélène Cousineau. I am co-director of the research group EPIC (esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique) where we discuss the politics and aesthetics of screen images. My latest publications include a book chapter on the rock group U2 ( MacKenzie and Iversen, 2021) a book chapter on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) on Québécois cinema and Americanité (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019) and a book chapter on Canadian and Québécois Indigenous cinemas (Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema, 2019). I am presently working on a project involving the creation of an international network for Indigenous women filmmakers, and continuing  partnerships with the Wapikoni Mobile and the INAAC (the International Network for Aboriginal Audio-Visual Creation).  

Besides my research, which I am very passionate about, I love to be outdoors, connecting with nature. I have studied medicinal plants and take every occasion I get to play outside; canoeing, hiking, skiing, camping, gardening. I also love writing poetry and teaching courses where I can develop a strong connection with my students. 

Claire Gray is a research assistant to Professor Karine Bertrand in the Arnait Video Productions case study. She has just finished her MA in Film Studies at Concordia University.

Emily Collins is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary researcher, arts administrator and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. She has worked across arts organizations in local and international settings, including the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Festival Scope (Paris), VUCAVU (Toronto), PUBLIC Journal (Toronto), and the Toronto International Film Festival. She holds graduate degrees in Arts and Culture from Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Cinema and Media Studies from York University (Toronto). Situated at the intersection of film and media, sound studies, cultural studies and gender studies, Emily's PhD research considers practices of deep listening, sonic epistemologies and embodied soundscapes. Namely, her project examines how sonic intervention and experimentation within audio-visual works can function as tools of resistance, instruments for disruption and modes of trans-sensory knowledge formation.

Hannah Schallert is a media and dance artist and researcher based in Montreal and Toronto. She holds an Honours BFA in Dance and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from York University, and is currently a first-year PhD student in Concordia University’s Communication Studies program. Hannah’s research interests include animation, special effects, experimental film, Science Fiction, archives and performance, and expanded understandings of dance and choreography in relation to moving image media. Her doctoral research will study animation movement, labour, and technology in the contemporary Canadian Visual Effects industry through the lens of embodied knowledge and performance. Hannah’s previous creative work has spanned live performance, installation, and dance film. Her current practice centres around found footage, collage, and animation, in addition to continuing to create projection-based pieces with dance artists. Hannah’s work has been presented at festivals and galleries in Toronto, including dance: made in Canada and Beaver Hall Gallery. She is a member of Immer and Roses artistic collectives. With Immer, Hannah recently completed 100 Years of Cinematic Solitude in 300 Moving Pieces, a dance film utilizing chronologically organized movement excerpts from the performances of women in world cinema over the past century as a basis for choreography and original video design.