Mary Bunch
Assistant Professor
bunch@yorku.ca
Dr. Mary Bunch is an Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Arts and affiliated with Theatre Studies, and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA). She earned her PhD in Theory and Criticism at Western University in 2011. Dr. Bunch’s teaching and research interests include interdisciplinary and collaborative critical disability, feminist, queer studies and critical theory, research creation and arts-based methodologies. She works at the intersection of the political imagination and its visual / sensory expressions. Her current project on Ecstatic Freedom engages theoretical, activist, and arts epistemologies as these re-envision the forms that democratic participation, political belonging and justice take. She has published articles in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; Feminist Theory; Culture, Theory and Critique; and the Canadian Journal of Human Rights. Dr. Bunch has taught at McGill University, the University of Toronto and Western University.
Patricio Davila
Associate Professor
pdavila@yorku.ca
Patricio Dávila is a designer, artist, researcher and educator. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, at York University. He is also core member of the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) project at York University. Patricio is also co-director of Public Visualization Lab (PVL). PVL is a networked lab (York U, OCADU, Ryerson U) and focuses on how visualization can operate as a critical design and media practice. A priority for the lab is to understand the ways that the representation of data is political as well as analytical, designerly and creative. A basic premise that guides PVL’s projects is that visualization is an assemblage that arranges people, things and processes and as such demands a commitment to ethics, accountability and meaningful participation.
Patricio’s research and practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in the visualization of spatial issues with a specific focus on urban experiences, mobile technologies and large-scale interactive public installations. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for examining data visualization as assemblages of subjectivation and power. In his creative practice he has created mobile applications, locative media projects, essay videos, new media installations, and participatory community projects including: Shadows!, Powers of Kin, Chthuluscene, Tent City Projections, The Line, and In The Air Tonight. His research and practice also include curatorial projects such as Multiplex Essay Film Festival and the Diagrams of Power exhibition, research events, and book published by Onomatopee Projects (NL).
Select publications include Dávila, P., (Ed.). (2019). Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance. Onomatopee Projects, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Dávila, P., (2017). Visualization as assemblage: Exploring critical visualization practice. Information Design Journal 23(1); Dávila, P., Colangelo, D., Chan, M., Tu, R. (2017). Expressive Cartography, Boundary Objects and the Aesthetics of Public Visualization. Leonardo 50(5).
Caitlin Fisher
Professor
caitlin@yorku.ca
Caitlin Fisher’s primary research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. Current research interests also include digital archiving, lifelogging, data visualization and experimental game structures for storytelling.
Professor Fisher was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in 2004. She is a co-founder of the Future Cinema Lab, dedicated to the exploration of new stories for new screens, and director of the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York. In the AR Lab, she is working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments and build expressive software tools for artists.
Dr. Fisher completed one of the first hypertextual dissertations in Canada. Her hypermedia novella, These Waves of Girls, an exploration of memory, girlhood, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality, was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization’s Award for Fiction. In 2008, she won the International Digital Literature Award Ciutat de Vinaròs Prize in Poetry for her augmented reality journey poem, “Andromeda”.
Professor Fisher has taught at York University’s School of Women’s Studies at York and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Carleton University. She received York’s University-Wide Teaching Award in 1999.
John Greyson
Associate Professor
greyzone@yorku.ca
The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world.
Feature films include: Urinal (1988 – Best Feature Teddy, Berlin Film Festival); Zero Patience (1993 – Best Canadian Film, Sudbury Film Festival); Lilies (1996 – Best Film Genie, Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, San Francisco); Uncut (1997, Honourable Mention, Berlin Film Festival); The Law of Enclosures (2000, Best Actor Genie); Proteus, co-created with Jack Lewis (2003); and Fig Trees (2008 – Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Berlin Film Festival). Film/video shorts include: The Kipling Trilogy (1984-5), The ADS Epidemic (1987), The Making of Monsters (1991 – Best Canadian Short, Toronto Film Festival; Best Short Film Teddy – Berlin Film Festival), Herr (1998) and Packin’ (2001).
As a director for television, his credits include episodes for such series as Queer as Folk, Made In Canada (Best Director Gemini, 2002), Drop the Beat and Welcome to Paradox.
Professor Greyson’s publications include Urinal and Other Stories (Power Plant/Art Metropole) and co-editor of Queer Looks, a critical anthology of gay/lesbian media theory (Routledge). He is a co-investigator on York’s Future Cinema Lab, a joint research project with Film Professors Janine Marchessault and Caitlin Fisher. Supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Future Cinema Lab is a state-of-the-art media research facility into new digital storytelling techniques and how these can critically transform a diverse array of state-of-the-art screens.
John Greyson is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects, including The Olive Project, Deep Dish TV, Blah Blah Blah and AIDS Action Now. His contributions as a member and through service on the boards of arts organizations include V/Tape Distribution, Inside Out Film/Video Festival, the Euclid Theatre, Trinity Square Video, Charles St. Video, LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers Toronto) and Beaver Hall Artists Housing Co-op.
Professor Greyson has taught film and video theory and production in Canada, the United States, Cuba and South Africa. He joined the full-time faculty in York’s Film Department in 2005.
Brenda Longfellow
Professor
brendal@yorku.ca
Professor Longfellow has published articles on documentary, feminist film theory and Canadian cinema in Public, CineTracts, Screen, and the Journal of Canadian Film Studies. She is a co-editor (with Scott MacKenzie and Tom Waugh) of the anthology The Perils of Pedagogy: the Works of John Greyson (2013) and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers (1992). Her documentaries have been screened and broadcast internationally, winning prestigious awards including the Audience Award for Best Experimental Film for Dead Ducks at the Santa Cruz Film Festival (2011); A Bronze Remi Award for Weather Report at the Houston Film Festival (2008); Best Cultural Documentary for Tina in Mexico at the Havana International Film Festival (2002); a Canadian Genie for Shadowmaker/ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998) and the Grand Prix at Oberhausen for Our Marilyn (1988). Other films include Gerda, (1992), A Balkan Journey (1996) and Carpe Diem (2010).
She recently launched the SSHRC funded interactive web documentary OFFSHORE, co-directed with Glen Richards and Helios Design Lab. OFFSHORE may be viewed here.
Janine Marchessault
Professor
jmarches@yorku.ca
Janine Marchessault is a professor in Cinema and Media Arts and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research has engaged with four areas: the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR); diverse models of public art, festivals, and site specific curation; 21st century moving-image archives and notions of collective memory/history. She is a founder of the Future Cinema Lab, and the 2014-2016 inaugural Director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts Research. A Trudeau Fellow, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
She belongs to the CinemaExpo67 research group and is a founding member of the Public Access Curatorial Collective. Her latest project is an expanded cinema festival Outer Worlds — commissioning five IMAX films by artists which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 as part of Images Festival.
Dr. Marchessault is the PI for Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Moving Image Heritage (2018-2024 SSHRC Partnership Grant), a research collaboration involving more than 14 community and artist run archives in Canada devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant and women’s histories. Her research explores the afterlife of moving image archives as art forms and new forms of historical knowledge.
Publications include: Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias and Ecologies (MIT 2017); Cosmic Media: Marshall McLuhan (Sage 2005); and numerous collections including the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (w/ W. Straw Oxford University Press 2019), Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (w/ S. MacKenzie MQUP 2019), Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (w/ M. Gagnon MQUP 2014); Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (w/ M. Darroch MQUP 2014);
Research interests include archives and counter-archives, media materiality, live cinema and real-time, urban space and visual culture, expanded cinema, feminist, queer and post-colonial media, cultural festivals and performance, curatorial studies, theories of spectatorship, phenomenology, history on/through screens, climate change studies.
Taien Ng-Chan
Assistant Professor
taien@yorku.ca
Taien Ng-Chan is a writer and media artist whose work takes on hybrid forms of experimental cinema and soundscape, poetry, and processes of mapping. Her research explores locative media art, creative practices of everyday life and daily travel, “object-oriented storytelling,” place-based narrative and Futurist imaginings. In addition to her scholarly work in such publications as Intermediality, Wi: Journal of Mobile Media and Humanities, Taien has also published four books and anthologies of creative writing, produced multimedia arts websites, and written for stage, screen, and CBC Radio. She has shown her media works in film festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally, including at the Biennale internationale d’art numérique in Montreal, the International Mobile Innovation Screenings in New Zealand, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Taien is one half of the artist-research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU), Chair of the Art and Cartography Commission of the International Cartographic Association, and a founding member of Zineposium, an annual DIY arts and zines fair. In 2019, she won the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Media Arts. More information on her projects can be found at her website: soyfishmedia.com
Kenneth Rogers
Associate Professor
krogers1@yorku.ca
Ken Rogers is Associate Director of the MBA Program in Arts Media and Entertainment. He is also Associate Dean, Research at York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design (AMPD). He is the author of The Attention Complex (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and has published on the social and cultural impact of art, media art, and emerging media technology. His current research focuses on the fields of cultural policy, media policy, and media industry studies.
A member of the City of Toronto’s Film, Television and Digital Media Board, Ken is also on the steering committee of Digital Media at the Crossroads (DM@X), and a member of York University pan-faculty Strategic Entrepreneurship Council at Innovation York. He is a founder and a core faculty member of AMPD’s new BFA in Media Arts. Ken is chair of the advisory board for York at Cinespace, a 6,000 square-foot film studio at Cinespace’s Kipling facility, an industry-academic partnership offering world-class job shadowing and experiential education opportunities in the screen industries to York students.
Ingrid Veninger
Assistant Professor
ingridv@yorku.ca
Ingrid Veninger holds an MFA from York University and has been a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts since 2019. Born in Bratislava and raised in Canada, Ingrid has produced fifteen feature films with premieres at TIFF, Rotterdam, Locarno, Slamdance, Whistler, Rome, Hot Docs, Karlovy Vary, Busan and MoMA in New York. She has received retrospectives of her work at the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa, Canada) and FEMCine (Santiago, Chile). She has been the recipient of the WIFTS International Visionary Award, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists EDA Award for ‘Best Director’, and the Jay Scott Prize presented by the Toronto Film Critics Association. A member of the Directors Guild of Canada and participant in the inaugural TIFF Studio, Berlinale Talents, and Rotterdam Producer’s Lab, Ingrid has been a mentor at the Canadian Film Centre and Screenwriter-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. An advocate for gender parity, Ingrid launched the pUNK Films Femmes Lab in 2014 to foster six narrative feature films written and directed by Canadian women, sponsored by Academy Award winner Melissa Leo. Recently, she completed a collaborative feature film and web project, involving nine women filmmakers, isolating in different parts of the world, created in context of the coronavirus pandemic entitled – ONE(NINE) – to premiere in 2021.
