An experienced, passionate, and committed Media Educator for the past 15 years, Jessie Curell has been teaching dynamic, production-based Media and Digital Literacy workshops across Canada, the US, and Asia with the National Film Board of Canada and a wide variety of schools, museums, non-profit organizations, and film festivals. She has met thousands of teachers and students, and has first-hand knowledge of specific needs and interests, which have helped shape the way she works with each group.

Chloë Brushwood Rose is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and Vice-Provost Teaching & Learning at York University. Her research interests bridge several fields, including community-engaged visual research methods, media and arts-based education, and gender, feminist and queer studies. Chloë is also a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) working with children, adolescents and their families, affiliated with the Canadian Institute for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

She is the co-author of Community-based Media Pedagogies: Relational Approaches to Listening in the Commons (Routledge, 2016), and the co-editor of a recent special issue of the Journal of Teaching and Learning on the impacts of COVID-19 for children, youth and education. Her scholarly work has appeared in several journal publications, including the Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society; Qualitative Studies in Education; Visual Studies; Changing English; International Journal of Leadership in Education; and, Gender and Education. Chloë is co-editor of several anthologies, including two anthologies on queer culture: the Lambda short-listed Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002) and the winner of a Golden Crown Literary Society Award, And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families (Insomniac Press, 2010).

Marta Braun is the Director of the Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management MA program at Ryerson. She is author of Picturing Time: the Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (UCP, 1992), Eadweard Muybridge (Reaktion, 2010) and the children’s book Muybridge and the Riddle of Locomotion (Firefly, 2013). Her essays have appeared in Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, (ed. Vivien Greene 2014), Helios, the Art of Eadweard Muybridge (ed. Phillip Brookman, 2010), Musée de quai Branly; la collection, (ed. Yves le Fur, 2008), L’Art de la Photographie des origins à nos jours, (eds. André Gunthert and Michel Poivert, 2007). She has been made a fellow of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Weimar Germany. (IKKM), a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

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. 

Dr. Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is Assistant Professor of Arts & Media Management at the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC), cross-appointed to the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Dr. Luka is an award-winning scholar, policy maker, activist, and digital media maker for the arts and creative economy, broadcasting and telecommunications. She studies co-creative and collaborative modes of creative production and distribution in the digital age, to investigate how arts, culture, media, and civic sectors are networked together.

Dr. Luka has worked with 100+ cultural organizations as a consultant, staff member or advisor. She is Past Chair of the Board for Arts Nova Scotia, and past member of the Creative Nova Scotia Leadership Council, NSCAD University’s Board of Governors, and the Provincial and Territorial Advisory Group of the Cultural Human Resources Council. She is a founding member of research-creation and public art walking group, Narratives in Space + Time Society (NiS+TS).

Brenda teaches in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University and has published extensively on documentary, feminist film theory, and Canadian and Québec cinema. Her documentaries have been screened and broadcast internationally winning awards including Best Cultural Documentary for Tina in Mexico (2002) at the Havana International Film Festival, a Canadian Genie for Shadowmaker/Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998), and the Grand Prix at Oberhausen for Our Marilyn (1988).

Her work has included feminist archival projects as well as a series of short films, and a television documentary exploring the tenacity of fossil fuel addiction. Her interactive documentary, Offshore (2012) is available at http://offshore-interactive.com. She is currently working on a co-created documentary project and installation with formerly incarcerated women in Vancouver.

Susan Lord is Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University and Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies. She is the Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab (with Dylan Robinson and Rosaleen Hill). With a background in feminist and critical theory, her research has been dedicated to the histories of vulnerable media and in the remediation of these histories through curatorial and cultural events. These projects are necessarily collaborative, engaging with other researchers, cultural producers, policy and social actors to advance citizenship practices, expand the civic spaces, and decolonize the lands on which we live and work.

Her publications include two recent special issues of PUBLIC: Archive/Counter Archives and Havana (http://www.publicjournal.ca/issues/). A book on the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez is forthcoming in 2019. Other books include Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation (with Annette Burfoot); New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (with K. Dubinsky, et al); Fluid Screens/Expanded Cinema ( withJanine Marchessault).

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.

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.