alma aamiry-khasawnih is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her scholarship focuses on access to the street in post-colonial and settler-colonial nation states as a site to understanding and articulating access to citizenship. Her current project examines ephemeral visual culture production as sites that orient, disorient, and reorient feminist debates on gender, class, and religion. She also examines how white-washing walls, cleansing, and beautification projects are all part of authoritarian visual culture and politics of respectability that aim at policing bodies in public spaces.
Razan AlSalah is a filmmaker and media artist working between Canada, the US and Lebanon. Her work explores our contemporary (dis)connection to place, which particularly comes to question in digital spaces, and more so now in virtual reality. Her short film your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba, won Best Narrative Short at Cinema Days Palestine, has been acquired by the Palestine Films Collection and has been selected in film festivals including HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Blackstar Film Festival, Glasgow International Short Film Festival, and Haifa Independent Film Festival. This is Razan’s first film. Her video sculptures have exhibited in solo and group shows in venues including Flux Factory (New York), ICEBOX and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Beirut Design Week and Sursock Museum (Beirut) and Ann Arbor Film Festival Off the screen! Razan is a Knight Fellow at Sundance New Frontier 2018 and was a 3-year Fulbright scholar pursuing her MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia where she currently teaches; she is also a mentor at the CAMRA Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Razan has been invited as a visiting artist to the Palestine and Documentary Conference and MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Culture and Ethics course at Princeton University and Palestinian Voices film-residency at Skidmore College.
Caroline Gil Rodríguez is a media archivist, who has worked at the Wildlife Conservation Society, Smithsonian’s Center for Folklore and Cultural Heritage, the New Art Trust, New York Public Library, Third World Newsreel, Allied Productions, Filmoteca de Catalunya, and with media artists’ personal collections. Her areas of interest include Latin American video art, media collectives, electronics, and low-cost solutions for digital preservation. She is a recent graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program and holds a Director of Cinematography MA from Universidad de Barcelona-ESCAC and BA in Visual Arts.
Anna Haglin is a multimedia artist and writer currently serving as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. She attended Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts. She earned her Master’s and Master of Fine Arts Degrees from the University of Iowa Printmaking and book arts programs. She has completed a two-year apprenticeship in bookbinding at the Arion Press in San Francisco and a studio assistantship at the Women’s Studio Workshop in upstate New York. Anna was a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts artist-in-residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, a finalist for the NYC Center for the Book Fellows Program, and a 2014 artist-in-residence at Art Farm in Nebraska.
Emma Lansdowne is a horticulturalist and writer/researcher from Victoria, BC. She has just completed her Master’s degree in Cultural Studies & Critical Theory at McMaster University, and also holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Victoria. Her current research involves gardening as a practice of place-making, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion embedded in such a practice. Emma looks forward to starting a doctorate program in January 2019, and until then can be found working amongst the birds, bees and flowers on Vancouver Island.
Cameron McEwan teaches architectural design, history and theory at the Grenfell-Baines Institute of Architecture, University of Central Lancashire, UK, and is a Trustee of the AE Foundation, an independent organization for architecture and education. Cameron studied architecture at Dundee School of Architecture followed by a PhD on the architect Aldo Rossi and the Analogical City at the Geddes Institute for Urban Research. Cameron’s work is focused on the relationship between architecture, representation and subjectivity to engage the city as a critical project. His texts and drawings have been published in JAE, Urban Blur, Outsiders for the 2014 Venice Biennale, and elsewhere.
Sherena Razek is a second year Masters student in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British of Columbia. In 2017, she was Co-Chair of the 40th Annual AHVA Graduate Symposium ‘Under Super Vision’, a conference that invited scholarly discourse on the naturalization of contemporary and historical surveillance practices in visual culture. She was co-curator of the associated art exhibition of the same title held at the AHVA Gallery. She is the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship to support her thesis project on the establishment of the first Middle Eastern women’s photographic collective entitled Rawi’ya. Sherena is a member of the Critical Racial and Anti-Colonial Studies network at UBC where she participates in conferences and workshops. Her research interests include the intersection of gender studies, critical racial and anticolonial frameworks, and the history and theory of documentary photography and its dialectical capacity in the Middle East and Palestine.
Christian Sancto is a research master’s degree candidate in the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). His principal research approach is to look at how social and political problematics are articulated in media- and performance-based practices, from contemporary art to social movements, primarily through using theoretical perspectives proffered by continental philosophy and critical theory. His master’s thesis project directs Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the ethics and politics of cinema towards an analysis of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’s video work REEL-UNREEL (2011).