Hilary Bergen (Concordia University, Canada)
Hilary Bergen holds a BA in Dance (University of Winnipeg) and an MA in English Literature (Concordia University). Currently, she is a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, where she studies screendance, posthumanism and media studies. She works as a research assistant to Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka for their upcoming book, "What is a Media Lab?" and for Angelique Willkie's project, "Against the Blank Canvas: Corporeal Dramaturgy in Dance Creation and Performance." She teaches in the English department and is a tutorial leader in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Hilary has been interviewed by CBC Radio, Le Devoir and Science Quebéc, and has published work with Screening the Past, Word and Text, Culture Machine, Archée and PUBLIC (forthcoming). Her doctoral dissertation takes up notions of relation and the embodied trace in mediated corporeality to define a posthuman theory of dance.
Yujia Bian
Yujia Bian is a researcher in landscape, architecture, and art. Trained both in landscape architecture and architectural history and theory, her works interrogate the regulation and interpretation of nature through a materialistic approach that often involves design and exhibition-making. Her most recent work focuses on environment and nature expeditions in the Mekong Delta and the Himalayas during the late 19th century and early 20th century. She holds a MS in Critical, Conceptual, and Curatorial Practices in Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP.
Clemens Finkelstein (Princeton University, US)
Clemens Finkelstein is a doctoral student in the Department of Architecture at Princeton University. His work explores the History/Theory of Architecture at the field’s junction with Media Studies and the History/Philosophy of Science and Technology. In particular, he investigates the media agency of vibration in the early twentieth-century as it pertains to the built environment and the psychophysiological condition of its human dwellers. His articles and reviews have appeared in several edited volumes and journals including ARCH+, trans., San Rocco, and Art Papers. He has worked extensively as an editor and curator—currently serving as a curator-at-large at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles. He received a B.A. in Art History and Cultural Studies from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, an M.Des. in the History and Philosophy of Design and Media from Harvard University, scholarships from Fulbright and Harvard University (2015-2017), and Princeton University’s Lowell M. Palmer Fellowship (2018-2019).
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier (UC Berkeley, US)
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is a PhD candidate in Film & Media at UC Berkeley. She researches moving images at the intersection of contemporary art and computational media. Her dissertation focuses on the technological loop in moving image culture, in order to map notions of temporality in the digital age. The loop is a fundamental structure of the digital age, a central concept in computer programming languages, yet the loop in time-based media precedes the digital and even the mechanical. By examining this formal strategy of moving image technologies at moments of emergence or transformation, her research considers shifting conceptions of time in capitalist society. Kaitlin serves as the Graduate Representative to the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Co-Organizer of the Berkeley New Media Working Group. Her research has been supported with fellowships from the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Berkeley Institute for International Studies.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher whose work addresses the material interweaving between the contemporary image and the living surfaces of the planet. His practice is based on the elaboration of platforms -installations, devices and workshops- conceived as material assays, where art, knowledge and politics intersect. His work has been shown and discussed in venues such as Transmediale (Berlin), Matadero Center of Art (Madrid), Galeria Millenium (Lisbon), MUSAC (León), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Laboral Center of Art (Gijón) as well as in Cultural Centers of Spain in Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador. He is currently a PhD student at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, part of the AMT Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group and part time instructor at the European University of Madrid.
Sandra Huber (Concordia University, Canada)
Sandra Huber is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, where she combines media studies, anthropology, and fine arts to look at communication with the dead within contemporary witchcraft. Through categories of glass, fluid, and inscription, Sandra examines how mediumship destabilizes a post-psychoanalytic focus on “consciousness,” the fixity of signs, and biases around who and what can and cannot communicate, as well as in what ways this communication materializes. In her work in general, Sandra is interested in approaching questions concerning the secretive or the occulted through embodied research. She is the author of Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014). She currently lives in Montreal / Tio’tia:ke. https://sandrahuber.com
Rachel Hutcheson (Columbia University, US)
Rachel Hutcheson is currently an art history doctoral student at Columbia University, she studies modern and contemporary art with a focus on photography, cinema, video, and installation. Her research interests include histories of technology and perception from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her current work explores the relationship between color photography and the environment. Prior to entering the PhD program at Columbia, Rachel completed her M.A. in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and BA at Virginia Commonwealth University (2011). Rachel interned for the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and was a curatorial intern at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She was also the Assistant Curator and Exhibition Coordinator at the University of Mary Washington Galleries.
Tory Jeffay (UC Berkeley)
Tory Jeffay is a PhD student in the department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in New Media. Her research is focused on the questions of visual evidence, specifically the history of photographic technology in the courtroom. Her most current work deals with police body cameras in the present day and photographic enlargements late nineteenth century inheritance cases. She received her B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she worked as an editor on documentary films.
Emine Seda Kayim (University of Michigan, US)
Emine Seda Kayim is an architect, historian, and documentary film maker. She is currently an PhD Candidate in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Seda’s scholarly work focuses on the intersection of architecture, media studies, and German studies, with an emphasis on the technologies and materialities of space. Her doctoral dissertation explores the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of State Security—known as the Stasi—as an architectural producer, interrogating the co-production of architecture and surveillance in the East German built environment. Seda’s documentary work was exhibited at the Istanbul Design Biennial, Prague Architecture Week, and University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archeology. She is the recipient of the 2018 Carter Manny Award in Research by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, and the 2017 Dr. Helen Wu Award by the Rackham Graduate School.
Matthew Mendez (Yale University, US)
Matthew Mendez is a PhD student in music history at Yale University. A specialist in post-1945 sonic and musical practices and techniques, Matt’s dissertation project is a media genealogy and historical epistemology of the information-theoretic voice: framing the coalescence of new musical, legalistic, and identitarian ontologies as a reaction to the exteriorization and algorithmization of the human voice over the long twentieth century, the dissertation chronicles the gradual breakdown of those same ontologies in the face of the new regimes of truth operationalized by the informational voice. More broadly, Matt is committed to bringing methodological perspectives from science studies and media theory, archaeology, and ecology to bear on the concerns of scholarship on experimental sound and music. Matt holds a Bachelor’s degree in music from Harvard University, and he also earned Masters degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Nathan Roberts (Harvard University, US)
Nathan Roberts is a PhD Candidate in the Film and Visual Studies Program at Harvard University, and a 2019 recipient of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Merit Fellowship. His dissertation situates filmic media within the study of relational varieties, for existential ends. His writing on media art has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the author of the memoir Surface Tensions: Searching for Sacred Connection in a Media–Saturated World (Hendrickson, 2016). Nathan curated the 2018 film series Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination for the Harvard Film Archive, in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and he has presented at several international conferences.
Robin Schrade (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany)
Robin Schrade, M.A., has been a PhD student and member of the DFG Graduate Research Group "Documentary Practices. Excess and Privation" at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, since October 2016. He is currently working on his dissertation project, examining the extent to which the mechanisms of digital search engines, oscillating between overview and surveillance, can be traced back to historical methods of searching and finding. He received his degrees in Media Studies, Theatre Studies and Film Studies from the Universities of Bochum and Lille, France. His fields of research include search engines, digital media, history of technology, media philosophy, documentary practices and narration theory. He recently published a book discussing the search engine as a black box. (Die Suchmaschine als Black Box. Leipzig 2019.)
Eva Schreiner (Columbia University, US)
Eva Schreiner is a PhD candidate in Architecture History and Theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). Her dissertation, preliminarily titled “Kultur of Empire: The Production of Land, the Spirit of Capital, and the German Orient, 1871-1919,” concerns the techniques of German imperialism in the Ottoman Empire around 1900, with a particular focus on agriculture, finance, and religion. This research is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF). Eva is also a candidate in the Graduate Certificate Program at Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and is currently working with Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research on the project “Conflict Urbanism: Aleppo.” Before joining Columbia, she completed a MA in Near Eastern Studies at New York University.