TEAM

Organizing Committee

The organizing committee members are graduates of the 2022 Middlebury Scholarship in Image & Sound who are eager to support new connections within the videographic community. To support this initiative, we received a Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant grant to make the workshop financially accessible to a broader group of video essayists. We see this workshop as a springboard for generating future collaborations and iterations of this workshop.

We are excited about cultivating conversations that will take us forward. For us, feedback begins with asking what is best for the maker. The workshop is imagined as a space for sharing and communicating. We see kindness and care as a guiding principle in fostering this community, from feedback to amplifying projects and rethinking common structures of scholarship.

Joel Burges (University of Rochester)

Dr. Joel Burges is Associate Professor of English and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where he is also affiliated with Digital Media Studies and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018) and co-editor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). He is currently working on a book project, “Television and the Work of Writing,” and a series of essays on the “horror of stagnation.” Also in progress are video essays on men, color, and race in contemporary film, the convention of “not coming out” in some recent gay films, and the frame on Queen Sugar.

Allison Cooper (Bowdoin College)

Dr. Allison Cooper is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is Director of Kinolab, a digital humanities laboratory for the analysis of film language. Her current research project, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program and carried out with co-PI Joel Burges, explores the ways in which at-scale analyses of the close-up in American film and television can expand our understanding of the representation of minoritized identities onscreen. Additional projects, funded by the National Humanities Center and the Mozilla Foundation, have focused on the curation of onscreen representations of technology to explore the ethical questions to which its development and use give rise. She is looking forward to working on videographic analyses of the close-up in film (once she has finally finished her final project from Middlebury!)

Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St Andrews)

Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Texture in film (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of Television performance (Red Globe Press, 2019) and is currently working on projects relating to design work in film and television. She has completed a couple of entries to Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary, and is working on a series of video essays exploring the colour design of George Hoyningen-Huene. She can be found on vimeo.

Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia)

Dr. Colleen Laird is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is currently writing a monograph on Japanese women directors, but is often distracted by a new love of making video essays (and her Vimeo channel). She has produced a series of public-facing educational videos on Japanese Cinema, and two series of interviews with scholars of Japanese Cinema (all of which are on her YouTube channel).

Dayna McLeod (Performance and Media Artist-Scholar)

Dr. Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist-scholar. She often uses humour and absurdity in her work to challenge societal norms and question dominant cultural narratives. Her recent work engages her sleeping self as collaborator to explore sleep as a site for production, and dreams as scripts for storytelling. McLeod is also working with AI actors and writers to examine issues of embodiment, representation, authenticity, and agency. Find her work on Vimeo.

Alison Peirse (University of Leeds)

Dr. Alison Peirse is an Associate Professor in Film and Media at the University of Leeds. Her research on horror, women’s film history, feminist historiography, and television has won multiple awards and her books include Women Make Horror: Filmmakers, Feminism, Genre (Rutgers University Press, 2020), After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film (IB Tauris, 2013), Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). In 2021, Women Make Horror won the BAFTSS 2020 Best Edited Collection Award and the British Fantasy Society Award for Non-Fiction. From February 2022–July 2023, she is an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellow, working on a new book and a videographic journal special issue on feminist horror cinema. Her essay film Three Ways to Dine Well has screened at multiple film festivals around the world and is now published in English and Spanish in Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays.