Â鶹¹ÙÍø

Michele Lawson is an internationally recognized journalist and social justice media producer. Since graduating from Â鶹¹ÙÍø with a BAH in Film, she has worked primarily in the charitable sector advocating on behalf of highly vulnerable individuals. As an MA student, she is interested in the ethics of representation and consent as it pertains to engaging those with lived experience in social justice media projects and programs. Her current focus includes building a case for supporting social change to help abandoned children in Muskoka by employing community-based participatory research (CBPR).

Deirdre is a PhD Student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Program. She has been a practicing artist for 35 years and focuses on film and video installation art, queer and feminist space making, and performance art. She has also dedicated her career to the evolution of artist run culture as well as creating and supporting maverick institutions such as FAG Feminist Art Gallery, The Film Farm, Vtape, and now FAR Feminist Art Residency. Her current research delves into the potential of vibration as access, sensibility, and vocabulary. 

Sheikh Mahmuda Sultana is a PhD candidate in Film and Media at Â鶹¹ÙÍø, Canada, and a faculty member in the Department of Television, Film and Photography at the University of Dhaka, currently on study leave. A Bangladeshi researcher, filmmaker, and curator, she reads cinema as a living archive of subaltern life, fractured space, and gendered survival in South Asia. Her interdisciplinary practice moves across cultural studies, Global South feminism, historiography, and curation, tracing how counter-histories and embodied ways of being take form and travel through image, cross-cultural dialogue and creative pedagogy .

Andrea Malus is a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Â鶹¹ÙÍø. Born in former Czechoslovakia, she trained in puppet and traditional toy making at a vocational school before emigrating to Canada. She holds an Honours BA in Visual Arts and studied animation at Sheridan College. Her research explores allegory in communist-era Czechoslovak animation, the relationship between the body and the performing object, and the tactile nature of materials in stop-motion animation.

A PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Faten considers herself an activist artist who seeks to contribute to the appreciation of various cultures and acceptance of the others in her own community and around the world. She works with various mediums ranging from handicrafts to digital photography and video to create her sight specific installations.

Lindsay K. Muir is a Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Ph.D. student within the Film and Media department at Â鶹¹ÙÍø. She recently completed her M.A. in the same department with her thesis, Where the Willow Meets the Moon: Lessons in Settler Curation Through Indigenous Storytelling. Prior to graduate school, Lindsay earned a double major in Art History and English Literature with a minor in World Cinemas from McGill University. Her current research revolves around the representations of Celtic and Indigenous women in various media.

Naomi Okabe is a media artist, writer, and creative researcher working at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program (Film and Media, Â鶹¹ÙÍø), where she is thinking about space media and decolonial outer space imaginaries. Naomi’s films have premiered at festivals such as Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival and Kingston Canadian Film Festival, and her writing is soon to be published by Silver Press, Mattering Press, and KOSMICA Magazine. Naomi also co-runs , a record label and publisher.

Heather is a PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. She is a horror scholar whose doctoral project proposes a new critical framework for understanding the found footage horror subgenre, engaging more broadly with the connections between genre cinema, digital media, and contemporary cultural anxieties.

Anne Runciman is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program at Â鶹¹ÙÍø's University. After finishing her BA in Political Studies, Anne went on to the Master’s program at Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s Film & Media where she studied drive-in movie theatres. As part of her Master’s thesis, she produced a podcast series, Let’s All Go to the Drive-In, which incorporated elements of archive media, sound effects and music to bring the listener into the world of the drive-in. Now in her PhD, Anne is studying museum exhibition design in dark tourism sites. She’s looking at how these grim tourist attractions use interior design, lighting, archive media, sound effects and music to shape the emotional experience of the visitor.

Shashank Satish is an Experimental Media Artist-Curator who works at the intersection of art, science, technology, and academia. Shashank holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture, a Master’s in Experimental Media Art, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Indian Aesthetics. He is the Principal Investigator of the Experiential Cognition Laboratory (XPC Lab, est. 2017), an independent initiative at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and art. The lab develops art-science projects and hosts Anubhava, a podcast exploring the role of experience in understanding consciousness through cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Shashank has taught Art and Architecture at the undergraduate level and published research at their intersection. As the founder of Holy Cow! Studio (Bangalore), he produces graphic design, art, and curatorial projects, with exhibitions of his new media art and curation showcased both in India and internationally.

Shashank's research at the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program focuses on experimental museology and the digitization of cultural heritage through critical curatorial frameworks.

Find more about Shashank's work at 

LinkedIn profile: 

Email: shashank.s@queensu.ca