TEAM

Barbara Zecchi is Full Professor and Head of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With a focus on feminist film theory, women filmmakers, aging studies, and videographic criticism, Zecchi has lectured widely in Europe, Africa, United States, Latin America, and Canada, and has published over 100 articles in scholarly journals. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of 11 volumes, including Women out of focus (Icaria 2014) (named “the most influential book of a decade” by the Spanish daily newspaper El Diario), and Gender-based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas (Routledge 2021). In 2017 she was elected associate member of the Academy of Motion Pictures of Spain. A prolific video-essayist, trained at Middlebury College Scholarship in Sound & Image | Workshop on Videographic Criticism where she returned in 2023 as guest mentor, her work has been featured in the Sight and Sound ‘Best Video Essay’ polls of the British Film Institute in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.  Zecchi's video essays serve as vehicles for her feminist interventions, and for her inquiries on the use of accented voices.  In 2022 she joined [in]Transition, the Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies as co-editor-in-chief.

Matthew Thomas Payne is an Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame (USA). His scholarly research centers on the social history of video games, with a particular focus on how social and governmental power is mediated by commercial gameplay. He is the author and editor of six books and over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He has taught multiple Video Essay courses at current and previous institutions, and is invited regularly to peer-review for journals and academic presses, including: [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, Bloomsbury, Routledge, and NYU Press among others. Two of his video essays appeared on Sight & Sound's "best video essays" lists of 2020 and 2023.

Dr. Colleen Laird is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Cinema in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada). She has published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Frames Cinema Journal, and Jump Cut. Her video essays have been included in the Sight and Sound “Best Video Essays” in 2022, 2023, and 2024. She was the PI for a 2023 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection (SSHRC) Grant for the “Embodying the Video Essay” workshop. She is the lead researcher of the SSHRC funded Japanese Women Directors Project and has produced three series of public-facing educational videos on Japanese cinema as well as interviews with international scholars of Japanese film (hosted on her YouTube channel). Her experiments with videographic criticism live on her Vimeo account.

Ariel Avissar is a video maker and media scholar from the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University (Israel). Since 2021 he has been Associate Editor at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies. His videos have been published at [in]Transition, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements and The Cine-Files. He has also co-edited several of Sight & Sound's "Best Video Essays" polls, on which his own work has been regularly featured. Check out his collaborative videographic projects: "Once Upon a Screen" (with Evelyn Kreutzer: vol. 1, vol. 2a and vol. 2b), the "TV Dictionary", and the "Screen Stars Dictionary" (with Tecmerin).