Arts & SciencePeople Directory
Adam Cook is a film critic, curator, and scholar. Outside of the academy, his experience as a writer and film programmer spans over a decade. Within the academy, Cook’s research seeks to find connective tissue between reductive strands of theory and a revitalized aesthetics centred on formalism.
I am a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and videographer, born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. I hold a Master’s degree in Film Production from York University where I developed my thesis project Hidden Gods. Besides fiction films I produced documentaries (Making Sones and Memories) and have been editor of some documentary projects. My most recent collaboration work Women Building Peace in Africa was awarded best documentary at the Silverwave Film Festival 2016. I also edited episodes of the TV series Battle Scars, about Canadian Military in times of peace and war.
Ahmed is an award-winning filmmaker, film scholar, and film programmer. His career spans over 19 years where he has made numerous shorts and features that played myriad international film festivals and picked several prestigious awards. Nour’s area of expertise comprises screenwriting, producing, video-editing, and directing. His work varies between experimental, documentary, and fiction films. However, his particular interest is in hybrid nonfiction filmmaking.
Alex Jansen is a creative entrepreneur with more than 20 years’ experience in the film & media industry and a passion for community development.
Jansen has spent more than a decade running his own successful multimedia production company, Pop Sandbox. He has produced award-winning films, video games, graphic novels and interactive experiences, featured at the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Hot Docs, the Tokyo Game Show, Indiecade and PAX East among others. Visit:
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.
I am the Chief Curator/Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. My curatorial approach involves resituating visual and material cultures through a feminist lens and innovations in interpretive display. Areas of research include women artists, artistic groups, regional scenes, collecting histories and intersections of art and craft.
Anran Zheng is an MA student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Communication in China, Anran turned her research interest to the intersection of film and gender, especially focusing on Chinese feminist and queer film. She is also interested in archival film and curatorial practice; gender and Asian pop/sub-culture.
Austin Benson did an Undergraduate degree in Film & Media and an MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen's. His research interests are in experimental and narrative production as well as film theory, history and criticism. For his Film 460 creative thesis he wrote a novel which he is now redrafting and created a work based on the text. He had a short film screened at KCFF '18 and as a writer has had publications in literary journals. Currently he is intent on taking his interests further in the 2019-2020 academic session to enhance the scope and style of his experimental media works, films and writings.
Research interests: transnational feminist theories and histories, queer theory, feminist methodologies and pedagogies, New York art world between 1960 and 1990, radical and experimental art practices, politics of labour in the arts, conceptualism, artist writings.
Canadian film and television, and in 2001 I started offering a senior-level seminar in film authorship that concentrates on the work of Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles. I've also been considering issues of film authorship in relation to my current research for a professional biography of Phillip Borsos (1953-1995), director of The Grey Fox, One Magic Christmas, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, and several other short and feature-length films. In addition to this work on Canadian film, I've devoted attention to a couple of other areas. The new edition of Television: Critical Methods and Applications, by Jeremy Butler, includes my revised chapter, "Music Television," which uses Lauryn Hill's Everything is Everything for a sample analysis.
Brandon Hocura is a sound artist, filmmaker, writer, and archivist. He is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher SĂ©ance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. His recent research areas include iterative sound, autonomous distribution networks, visual & sound poetry, material histories, rogue archives, archipelagic theory, and diasporic traditions.
Cam is the Film and Media Technician working in the equipment room at the Isabel Bader Center for the Performing Arts. Cam helps our students navigate the world of equipment, cameras, and all related technical needs.
Clarke Mackey has been teaching in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University for 26 years. Before that he taught at York University and Sheridan College of Art and Design.
Clarke is an accomplished media producer. He has worked as a director, cinematographer, editor, producer or writer on over 50 film, television and new media projects. Many have won awards and critical acclaim. His first feature film, The Only Thing You Know (1971), won two Canadian Film Awards (now called Genies) including the Best Actress award. This film is considered by many critics to be an important film in the early development of independent cinema in this country.
Areas of research and supervisory interest include: Visual and popular cultures; genre cinemas; horror films & monster movies; death studies; feminist-queer-trans histories of Classical Hollywood; fan-based reading practices; superhero comic books; histories of Eugenic medicine and criminality in the West; curricular design and pedagogical strategies.
Danae Elon is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer based in Montreal. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has directed, produced, and shot a body of work that explores the relationship between the personal and the political through intimate and powerful narratives. Her thesis film Never Again Forever (1996) won the Golden Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Achievement Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Her first feature documentary, Another Road Home (2004), premiered at Tribeca and went on to screen internationally at IDFA, Hot Docs, and numerous other festivals as well as be theatrically released in the US. With Partly Private (2009), Elon won the award for Best New York Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. P.S. Jerusalem (2015) was selected at both the Berlinale and the Toronto International Film Festival, confirming her reputation as a bold voice in personal documentaries, the film was released theatrically and the New York times awarded it a critics pick. The Patriarch’s Room (2017) won Best Research and Music award at Docaviv and first prizes at both the LA Greek Film Festival and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Her film A Sister’s Song (2018), for which she also served as cinematographer, was awarded Best Documentary at the Doker Film Festival and received an Iris Award for Best Cinematography, and the AIDC Innovation Award.
Most recently, her feature Rule of Stone (2024) was selected at IDFA, CPH:DOX, and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, while her short film Life of a Dog was produced with support from CBC. In addition to directing and producing, Elon has worked extensively as a cinematographer on her own films and in collaboration with other directors. The films she has produced screened as well at leading international festivals including Berlinale, Hot Docs, IDFA, Millennium and Sheffield. She is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Film (2009) and has been supported numerous times by institutions such as the Sundance Institute, the Catapult Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, Quebec Arts Council, SODEC and CMF. Through her combined roles as director, producer, and cinematographer, Elon continues to develop a practice that bridges the deeply personal with the universally political.
After graduating from Queen’s University with a Major in Sociology and a Minor in Film, Daniel transitioned to a Masters program in Cultural Studies, where he wrote his thesis “Hays Gone By: The Proto-Feminism of Pre-Code Hollywood and the Films of Mae West”. As an aspiring PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Daniel is continuing his studies of transgression within Hollywood cinema, specifically as it relates to the Hollywood Production Code. Outside of the classroom, Daniel also makes video essays analyzing art-house cinema and popular film on YouTube under the name Eyebrow Cinema.
Darien Sánchez Nicolás, our new Postdoctoral Fellow in the VML, is working on minor archives and radical distribution practices in the Americas. He is currently working with Marilu Mallet (Unfinished Diary and much more), the Chilean-Canadian filmmaker, helping to organize and find a home for her archive in Montreal.
Darien Sánchez Nicolás holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema of Concordia University. His doctoral dissertation, Cinematic Voyages: QuĂ©bĂ©cois Transnational Filmmaking and Cuban Domesticity examined the relationships between international tourism, transnational film production and homemaking in the island. He is a cross-appointed instructor in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Philosophies and Religions departments at John Abbott College, MontrĂ©al, Canada. He has worked as film pre-screener and programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, Latinarte Festival and the South Asian International Film Festival of MontrĂ©al, amongst others. He has received scholarships from Mexico’s National Council of Sciences and ľŢČéĘÓƵ (CONACYT), the Foundation DeSève Fellowship, the MITACS Globalink Research Award, and the Fonds de Recherche du QuĂ©bec–SociĂ©tĂ© et Culture scholarship. Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University’s Vulnerable Media Lab.
Darshana Chakrabarty is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies under Prof. Ali Na. She completed her second Masters in English, specializing in Film and Media Studies, from Arizona State University in Spring 2021. Her research investigates the formation and evolution of virtual social identities, politics, and cultures, of Indian queer individuals and communities within the domains of Indian digital media and contemporary Indian Indie cinema.
Denise is the Departmental Administrator for the Department of Film and Media at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Her duties include both financial and administrative tasks involving students, faculty and the public.
Derek was a freelance cinematographer and a lecturer in film, video and digital media production at Queen's from 1976 to 2015, teaching the Fundamentals of Production regularly and in some years Advanced Production or Video and Multimedia. He created the Film and Media Department's website in 1995 and maintained it until 2015, and served on the University's Instructional ľŢČéĘÓƵ Advisory Committee, Web Editorial Board, Radio Policy Board, and Campus Planning Committee.