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Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for �鶹����'s Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at �鶹����. Until 2000 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A book of essays and scripts was published in 2005: Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins, ed. A. J. Paterson, YYZ Books, Toronto; 2005; 254 pp.  

Cinema and media arts areas include gendered spaces and the city, women’s and Canadian cinemas,  and Cuban cinema and visual culture; decolonial practice; media archives and their remediation, social ecology of vulnerable media, collectives and collections; curatorial projects; media arts artists’ groups and artist-run centres.

After completing my PhD in Communications at McGill University, I went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to �鶹����’s, I taught at universities in the UK and Canada. At �鶹����’s, I have taught courses on Classical Hollywood cinemas; Arctic transnational cinemas; transnational European cinemas; film manifestos; film and media theory; Culture and Technology; and popular music and cultural studies, among others.

My work explores the activity of both new and old media systems, and particularly the instances in which its messiness becomes more evident: the fringe genres, precarious objects, and pirate practices. I often resort to forms of Research-Creation through independent curatorial endeavors that engage with experimental and vernacular moving images. My previous projects mobilize subjects such as media façades, hyper-ephemeral video, 3D printing and scanning, videogame emulation, VR, and generative coding. As an author, I have published on the subjects of image, space, and technology. My most recent books are the monograph "Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology" (Amsterdam University, 2019) and the edited collection “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (Oxford University, 2020). I am also the co-coordinator of the Besides the Screen research network and festival. Currently, I am working on an exhibition project about virtual museums and on a monograph about digital replicas and cultural heritage.

As a media scholar working at the intersections of race, queer, and feminist studies, my research focuses on how media performances define and defy conceptions of Asian/Asian diasporic bodies. Drawing on transnational cultural histories, I theorize resistance, complicity, and ambivalence in new border crossings facilitated by digital media. I am interested in the performance of media technologies. As such, my scholarship traverses the areas of digital media, popular culture, and media installation. My research seeks to establish a multidirectional relationship between medium and content. That is, I am interested how tangible technological objects and their processes, embodied practices around media technologies, and the content communicated through media work together. In the digital age, the ideas of media as immaterial, virtual, and transcendent dominate. My work pushes against this impulse by grounding the body, the material, and the haptic.

My Research-Creation work centres on making visible and legible obfuscated urban histories. In the interactive documentary we digitally reinscribed the Palestinians who were expelled during the 1948 war onto their neighborhoods and homes. In we look at environmental and colonial violence, but also re-naturalization, abundance and resilience in a Kingston city park that used to be a landfill. In the past ten years I have primarily worked within participatory and collaborative frameworks (in both my artistic practice and my academic writing). My focus is on interactive and augmented documentary, alongside cultural and other interventions in situ (guided walks, art installations, etc.). 

I am interested in supervising students who work on expansive manifestations of documentary cinema, post and decolonial media practices, anti-extraction culture, feminist methods, and ethics in media. I am also happy to supervise students who work on Middle Eastern cinemas and medias, and students focussed on settler accountability on Turtle Island.  

Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation. 

Her research interests center on the politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines media’s textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through China's situated experience but gradually expands to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia. Her current book project, Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making between the mid-twentieth century and the present. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower, and maritime signal sovereignty. Her book project was also supported by the (2024-2025) from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Music, violence and trauma; music and nationhood; music and gender. Recent publications examine music and cultural trauma (Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Mortality, 2017), American popular music in the aftermath of 9/11 (Music and War in the United States, 2019), and Canadian combatants, music, and the remembrance of war (MUSICultures, (2019).

Emily Pelstring is full-time faculty in the Department of Film and Media, where her teaching areas include video, performance, sound, animation, experimental media, and music video studies.  Her courses are built around creative exploration and collaboration, and she aims to facilitate a laboratory or workshop environment for students.