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Frances Leeming is a media artist and animator. Her performance and film projects explore the relationship between gender, technology and consumerism. Her work has been presented and exhibited across Canada, the U.S., Britain and Poland.

Her collage animation, The Orientation Express (1987) has been screened extensively including:

• Festival of Festivals, Toronto (1992),
• Festival de Cine y Video Joven Cubano,
• National Gallery of Cuba, Havana (1990),
• Seattle Women's Film Festival, Seattle, (1990),
• Women in the Director's Chair,
• Women's Film and Video Festival, Chicago (1989),
• ASIFA Animation Festival, San Francisco, (1989).

Selected purchases include the National Gallery of Canada, the Women's Television Network, Cornell University, California Institute For The Arts, PBS, Channel Four, and SBS (Australia). Leeming completed her third collage animation, Genetic Admiration (2005) which took the grand prize at Images Festival in Toronto. Her experimental film work has been featured inPublic 25: Experimentalism (2002) and performance history in Caught in the Act , an anthology of performance art by Canadian Women (2004). Leeming has guest lectured throughout Canada and taught in the Communication Studies Department at Concordia University, Montreal. Currently Frances teaches Animation and Screen Writing in the Department of Film Studies, Queen's University, Kingston.

VIDEOGRAPHY

Genetic Admiration. 2005, 23:00 minutes, colour, English.

Five Feminist Minutes. 1990, 113:00 minutes.

The Orientation Express. 1987, 14:00 minutes.

Almost Crying. 1978, 60:00 minutes.

Between joining the Department of Film Studies in 1976, and retiring from what had become the Department of Film and Media in 2013, I taught courses at every undergraduate level from first to fourth year. Whether it was our introductory course, FILM 110, or courses in film criticism or theory, I always brought a historical perspective to the subject at hand.

My research interests originally centred on the films of the American director Josef von Sternberg, whose work with Marlene Dietrich retains the power to engage and perplex its spectators decades after it appeared in the early 1930s. I edited one book of essays about Sternberg, and wrote another, Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount and America, on their 1932 film Blonde Venus.

As the 21st century began, both my research and my teaching became more oriented toward contemporary film, though always in an historical framework. French cinema, as it evolved through the final decade of the previous century and the first years of the present, became a subject I enjoyed considering, researching and making available to students. Eventually, my attention focused on contemporary French filmmakers' presentation of the love story, and this became the subject of my fourth-year seminar courses.

Since retirement, I have continued to write about recent French cinema. 

Here are some of my recent publications on that topic:

“Love Has a History’: France, Film, and Edith Piaf”, Journal of Popular Film and Television” 43:4 (2015): 212-219.

“The cinema of Jacques Chirac: governing the French film industry, 1995-2007”, Screen 56.3 (Autumn 2015): 357-368.

“First sight: how love stories begin (and how some of them end) in today’s French cinema”, Studies in French Cinema 14.2 (2014):1-12.

Ryan Randall is the Senior Technician and Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Film & Media as well as the Technical Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab and an award winning cinematographer.

An Associate of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers for the past 15 years, he actively shoots commercials, documentaries, shorts, and media arts projects. Ryan is also engaged in higher education and preservation. 

Works that Ryan has lensed have shown at Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), Sebastopol, Vancouver International Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, and DOXA Documentary Festival, amongst others. 

Ryan’s recent work on Workhorse (Caines, 2020) won the 2021 Canadian Screen Award for Best Cinematography in a Feature Length Documentary and was nominated in the 2020 Canadian Society of Cinematographer Awards for the Robert Brooks Award for Documentary Long Format Cinematography

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:

Recently Jansen was founding Commissioner of the Kingston Film Office, where he developed the infrastructure to attract and support film & media production locally.  This included the creation of training programs, incentive programs and new access to key locations such as Kingston Penitentiary.  By 2021, the sector generated more than $5million in direct spend annually.  The Film Office hosted more than a dozen major productions including Star Trek: Discovery, DC’s Titans, Reacher, Locke & Key, and the Mayor of Kingstown.  The Film Office had also begun partnering on more than a half dozen lower-budget end-to-end productions, shot entirely in Kingston with majority local crew.  In 2022 the Film Office was nominated for Top Film Commission globally by the Location Managers Guild International (LMGI).

Prior to starting Pop Sandbox, Jansen built and lead the Home Entertainment division at Mongrel Media, one of Canada’s premiere film distribution companies. He is founder of the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and teaches part-time with ���ϳԹ���Դ Film and Media.

Gabriel Menotti is Associate Professor at the Film and Media Department of ���ϳԹ���Դ. He holds a PhD in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths, University of London, and another in Communication and Semiotics from the Catholic University of São Paulo. He also works as an independent curator and artist-researcher in the broad field of moving images. His work on media technology has been published and presented worldwide. He is the author of “Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology” (AUP, 2019), and co-editor of “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (OUP, 2020), among other anthologies. He is also one of the coordinators of the Besides the Screen research network and festival, and convenes Museums Without Walls, a curatorial survey on media infrastructures and cultural institutions.

PhD Communication [Performance Studies, Media & Technology Studies, and Cultural Studies] (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies (Duke University)

M.A. Performance Studies (New York University)

B.A. Politics (Whitman College)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media and graduate programs in Screen Cultures & Curatorial Studies and Cultural Studies at ���ϳԹ���Դ.

I am a multidisciplinary scholar of media, performance, and culture with attention to race, gender, and sexuality. My scholarship is primarily concerned with questions of power, resistance, complicity, and ambivalence. Throughout my work, I aim to contextualize the limits and generative potential in digital media practices by reaching into the past and animating cultural histories in relation to contemporary anti-racist, queer, feminist, trans politics. In particular, I am invested in transnational Asian diasporic femininity and queerness as well as comparative racial histories related to the United States. Additionally, I am interested in the performance of media– that is the processes and experiential haptics of media – and performances through and alongside media technologies. As such, my scholarship traverses the areas of media installation, performance art, digital technologies, and popular cultures.

In addition to collaborative work on vulnerable media and unbearable appetites, I am working on two monograph projects.

Drawing on my doctoral work, my first book project is titled Trans Medial Performance: Affirming Asian/American Femininity Otherwise. Building with transnational Asian/American Studies, the project looks to develop a theoretical practice of affirming Asian and Asian diasporic femininity as expressed by media and performance makers. In order to demonstrate the political stakes of this tactic, I pose a selection of contemporary works in relation to socio-cultural histories that traverse long-ingrained imaginaries that fetishize and denigrate Asian hypersexuality, effeminacy, and trans perfection.

I am also working on a project that takes up the works and lives of Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Shigeko Kubota, and Nam June Paik. I am thinking through practices of these artists of color during the 1960’s and 1970’s in relation to material media studies history and contemporary digital practices. Ranging from Fluxus to the Black Arts Movement, this project is particularly concerned with embodiment in artistic practice as a precursor to the digital age with attention to materiality, processes, politics, degeneration, and obsolescence. I see this work as part of a broader objective to expand what counts as media theory, who counts as a media theorist, and what becomes the foundations of a discipline.

Selected Publications

Na, Ali. 2020. “Siliconicity: Yozmit and Performing a Trans Asian Horizon.” Theatre Journal 72 (3).

Na, Ali. 2019. “The Stuplime Loops of Becoming Slug: A Prosthetic Intervention in Orientalist Animality.” M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture

22 (5).

Na, Ali. 2019. “#AzizAnsariToo?: Desi Masculinity in America and Performing Funny Cute.” Women’s Studies in Communication 42 (3).

Na, Ali. 2018. “The Fetish of the Click: A Small History of the Computer Mouse as Vulva.” Feminist Media Studies 18 (2).

Na, Ali. 2017. “Gangnam Eth(n)ic: The Transnational Politics of YouTube.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 13 (3).

Graduate Student Supervisees

Note for prospective graduate students: I am currently accepting graduate students only if their proposals closely align with my ongoing research projects. Research areas may include: queer, trans, and feminine Asian/Asian diasporic media/performance/arts; queer of color critique; performance of/and/in digital media; material media studies history; media-based arts and cultural politics; etc. Please additionally see the above project descriptions.

MA

Edem Roberta Abbeyquaye

Syed Hammad Ali

Vivian Bingyu Sheng (co-supervised with Keren Zaiontz)

Zakary Jiwa

Darby Huk

PhD

Darshana Chakrabarty

Vince Vulam Ha

Peggy Fussell (co-supervised with Emily Pelstring)

My interest for cinema and films in general came from watching old black and white movies with my grandma on PBS on Sunday afternoons. Beyond these old Hollywood narratives, I have grown to love films stemming from all parts of the world. More recently, my research interests have been centered on Quebec cinema (intercultural collaborations), Indigenous films and poetry, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema.  

I am also a member of the Vulnerable Media Lab at ���ϳԹ���Դ and lead researcher for the Archive/Counter-Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) working with the Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women and with Québécois filmmaker Marie-Hélène Cousineau. I am co-director of the research group EPIC (esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique) where we discuss the politics and aesthetics of screen images. My latest publications include a book chapter on the rock group U2 ( MacKenzie and Iversen, 2021) a book chapter on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) on Québécois cinema and Americanité (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019) and a book chapter on Canadian and Québécois Indigenous cinemas (Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema, 2019). I am presently working on a project involving the creation of an international network for Indigenous women filmmakers, and continuing  partnerships with the Wapikoni Mobile and the INAAC (the International Network for Aboriginal Audio-Visual Creation).  

Besides my research, which I am very passionate about, I love to be outdoors, connecting with nature. I have studied medicinal plants and take every occasion I get to play outside; canoeing, hiking, skiing, camping, gardening. I also love writing poetry and teaching courses where I can develop a strong connection with my students. 

Selected Bibliography

Bertrand, Karine. “U2’s Rattle and Hum: God, Sex, Rock and Roll, and God again” in MacKenzie, Scott and Iverson, Gunnar, Images and Sounds of Fury: Mapping the Rockumentary, Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Bertrand, Karine. “L’œuvre documentaire d’Alanis Obomsawin et la voix des femmes autochtones.” Book chapter for the monograph entitled “De l’exclusion à la solidarité. Regards intersectionnels sur les médias” (Josette Brun, Ed.) Les Éditions Remue-Ménage, 2020.

Bertrand, Karine. “From Pierre Perrault to Wim Wenders: Auteur Cinema and the Poetic Exploration of Indigenous Lands and Identities” in Caminati, Luca and James Leo Cahill, Cinemas of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, AFI/Routledge, 2020.

Bertrand, Karine. “Auto-histoires et représentations communautaires dans le cinéma des femmes autochtones.” in Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques, vol. 29, Issue 1, Spring 2020, p. 69-89.

Bertrand, Karine. “L’énonciation épistolaire dans le cinéma québécois et autochtone contemporain” in Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicitaria, vol. 19, no.3, 2019, p. 307-326.

Bertrand, Karine. “Le cinéma autochtone au Québec, entre représentation et ré-appropriation” in Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, issue 2-3, 2019, p. 221-240.

Bertrand Karine and Baillargeon, Mercédès (eds.). “Introduction: Transnationalisme et cinéma Québécois” in Contemporary French Civilization, vol.44, issue 2-3, 2019, p.137-150.

Bertrand, Karine. “De Gilles Groulx à Jean-Marc Vallée: Transnationalisme, Américanité et territoire dans le cinéma québécois” in American Review of Canadian Studies, February 2019, p. 43-63.

Bertrand, Karine. “Martha of the North and Nunavik Narratives of Survivance” in Kaganovsky Lilya, MacKenzie, Scott and Westerståhl Stenport, Anna, Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, Bloomington Indiana: Indiana Press, 2019, p. 289-301.

Bertrand, Karine. “Canadian Indigenous Cinema: from Alanis Obomsawin to the Wapikoni Mobile” in Marchessault, Janine and Straw, Will, The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 105-124.

Bertrand, Karine. ‘‘Politiques et poétiques du langage : l’inuktitut et le corps-verbal dans le cinéma inuit’’ in TranscUlturAl, Vo. 10, no. 1, 2018, p. 29-44.

Bertrand, Karine. “Le collectif Arnait Video Productions et le cinéma engagé des femmes inuit: guérison communautaire et mémoire culturelle” in Revue canadienne de littérature comparée, Vol. 44 Issue 1, 2017, p. 36-53.

Trained as a filmmaker and film theorist, I have spent the past fifteen years working on site- specific participatory media projects that include single channel documentary, interactive documentary, augmented reality, as well as performance, curation guided walks, and community events.

In 2020 I co-embarked on a Research-Creation collaborative venture, in Belle Park, in Kingston, Ontario. The contends with colonial and environmental violence, but also with resilience, resistance, and re-naturalization. Through a series of artistic, and cultural events we make legible, visible and audible the history of a park that sits on a toxic landfill that was dumped on a wetland. At the entrance to the park stands an unmarked Totem Pole, carved by inmates at the Joyceville Institute in 1973 and gifted to the City of Kingston on the 300 years anniversary of European presence. The park leads to a bridge to Belle Island, an indigenous meeting place from time immemorial. Using video, Augmented Reality, performance, podcasts, etc. we animate the space speaking to, and about, its many layers. 

In 2016 I released  an interactive documentary that digitally layers the Palestinian past onto the Israeli present of southern Jerusalem.  The project involved Palestinians from the neighborhood who collaboratively made short poetic films that are embedded into a virtual walk, and an interactive map that is organically filled by the community.  The project was launched in November of 2016 at RIDM and has since screened dozens of times in festivals, academic settings and public screenings. 

I came to ���ϳԹ���Դ as a specialist in Israeli, and to a lesser extent, Palestinian cinemas.  I studied nationalism, gender and militarism, and expanded my work to include photography, and news media.  At ���ϳԹ���Դ I found a department especially supportive of combining theory and practice, and I soon merged my filmmaking background (a BFA from Tel-Aviv University and an MFA from Syracuse University) with my theoretical interests (PhD from the University of Alberta).  In the past few years I have been invested in developing sound participatory media practices, and together with Elizabeth Miller (Concordia) am developing an l to plan participatory media projects.

Selected Publications

Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem” in Palestine/Israel Review volume 1, issue 1, 2024

“Jerusalem, We Are Here: Reflections on the construction of a collaborative archive and its offshoots” in Jerusalem Quarterly, 89, PP. 106-128), May 2022

” in Afterimage Vol. 47, Issue #1, PP. 42-47. 2020

“On the WE in Jerusalem, We Are”, in Graylit, Rochester, NY, 8/2020

“A Rave Against the Occupation: Speaking for the Self and Excluding the Other in Contemporary Israeli Cinema” in Identity in Motion: An Israeli Film Reader eds. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, University of Texas Press, 2012.

“Combat cuties: photographs of Israeli women soldiers in the press since the 2006 Lebanon War” co-authored with Eva Berger, Media, War & Conflict 4(3) 269–286, 2011

“Unruly Daughters to Mother Nation: A Palestinian and an Israeli First Person Films.” Hypatia vol. 23 issue #2, Spring 2008.

“Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: Media, Gender and Performance in the case of the Palestinian Female Suicide Bomber,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Summer 2007. Vol.32 #4. Pp. 933-95

Reprinted in Feminist Perspectives on War and Terror (eds.) Karen Alexander and Mary Hawkesworth, University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Reprinted in Gender Through the Prism of Difference, 4th ed. (eds.) Maxine Baca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner, Oxford University Press, 2010. [Listed in the 20 most accessed articles on the Signs website]

"Elusive Frontiers: Borders in Palestinian and Israeli Cinema." Third Text, Vol. 20, issue 3/4 May-June 2006. pp. 511-521.

" The Silenced Outcry: A Feminist Perspective from the Israeli Checkpoints in Palestine." National Women Studies Association Journal.  18:3, Fall 2006.  PP. 168-180.

"In The Name of the Nation: Images of Palestinian and Israeli Women Fighters” in Killing Women eds. A. Burfoot & S. Lord-, Wilfred Laurier U. Press, 2006. Pp. 273-291.

 “Old Wine in New Bottles: Tekumah, an Israeli Resurrection of Social Change?” Jerusalem Quarterly Files, issue 19, 2003 PP. 37-48.

"Minding the Gap: Visual Perception and Cinematic Gap Filling" Style 36:1, Spring 2002 PP. 131-145.

“The Things You Can See From There: Notes on Liminality in Israeli and Palestinian Cinema,” Theory and Criticism #17, Spring 2001, PP. 215-221. In Hebrew.

"Orientalism as Alterity in Israeli Cinema," Cinema Journal 44:4, Summer issue, 2001, PP. 36-54.

“Woman/Nation: A Postcolonial Look at Female Subjectivity” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17:4, Fall 2000, PP.333-342.

Books and Journals:

Public Screens co-editor, special issue of Public, Spring 2010.

DigiPopo, co-editor of a special issue of Public (#31, 2005).

Middle Eastern Media Arts, Guest editor for special issue of Framework, 43:2, Fall 2002.

 Opinion Pieces In Press:

“.” The Conversation, April 2018

“” Local Call (Hebrew) and 972 Magazine (English), June 2014.

“” The Kingston Whig Standard, Dec. 5, 2012

“Coordinated Campaign Aimed to Stifle Academic Discussion about Israel Raised Critical Questions” CAUT Bulletin (Canadian Association of UniversityTeachers, October 2009.

“Israeli Election is Nothing to Celebrate” Rabble.ca, Feb. 11, 2009.

“Finally, I am a Canadian,” Kingston Whig Standard, Oct. 31, 2008.

“Zero Tolerance for Racists” Queens gazette, Nov. 24, 2008.

Filmography:

Jerusalem, We Are Here, 2016

Two Houses and a Longing (2008)

Jerusalem Walls: A Guided Tour (2006)

The Silver Platter (2005)

The Market's Song (2005)

Home, Bitter/Sweet Home (2003)

Salem/Jeru (2003)

O’ Canada, E.T. and Me (2003)

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.

Emily's primary mode of research is creative production. Her films, performances and installations have been shown internationally in galleries and festivals and have been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. She has also worked with numerous collaborators and clients as a music video director, and is a two-time nominee for the Prism Prize for Best Canadian Music Video (2012, 2020). Her specializations as an independent filmmaker are in experimental animation techniques for 16mm film and vintage analog video. Her gallery-based practice expands this moving-image experimentation into physical space using techniques such as holography, stereography, animated Pepper’s Ghost displays, and projection-mapped video. These sited object/installation pieces are meant to encourage reflection on the material contingency of the cinematic spectacle and the overlap of science, magic, and spirituality.

Emily also has a longstanding investment in reclaimative myth-making, collaboration, collectivity, speculative futurisms, and the use of camp aesthetics as strategies of resistance in feminist media art. These interests have led her to build bodies of video, installation, music and performance-oriented work with artists Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline. Their current SSHRC-funded research project is , an episodic series for web which draws on feminist materialist theory and explores themes like the cyborg, telepresence, hysteria, witchcraft, and human-animal relationships. 

Emily is currently working with fellow Film and Media colleagues (Vena, de Szegheo Lang, Na, and Norton) as well as researchers across the university on an international symposium called , which brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore the meaning and impact of current media representations of the witch.

artist's portfolio: 

Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for Queen's Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at ���ϳԹ���Դ. 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.  

Research Interests:    

Aesthetic theory; experimental media; experimental literature; image theory; image-text relations

Media Works:

2021    Rake Pail Clip Books  5:00

2021    The Parable of the Two Crows  4:00

2020    Parallel Life  12:00

2020    7 Anthropologies  19:00

2018    Or So It Seems  10:00

2019    X Marks installation  (with Matt Rogalsky)

2019    Doorway  8:00

2017    Pianthropomorphia  12:00 (with John Burge)

2017    A Child’s Concept of Chance  7:00

2016    Mama Minde  20:00

2016   Men Working On Boats at Night  10:30

2015   The Wide Wide World  9:00

2014   Only Believe Things That Are Easy To Understand         7:30

2014   Ocean View  10:00

2012   God Hates Himself   22:00

2012   Girl Sitting on Blue Chair  30:00

2010   The Unlucky Sailor  35:00

2009   7 Questions ���ϳԹ���Դ Bicycles  15:00

2008   How To Lose Consciousness  16:30

2007   Brain Worm #3  17:00

2006     jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim 12:00

2006     A Triad in 3 Parts 7:00

2006     The Harvest Is In 14:00

2005     10 Phrase Studies 10:00

2005     Brain Worm 24:00

2004     April 1967 7:00

2003     If Horses Had Gods 45:00

2003     Grammar Lesson 7:00

2003     52 Gods 5:00

2002     Limbic Moments 20:00

2000     Carl Andre's Overalls 11:00

1998     The Alien Seaman 20:00

1996     Finagnon 70:00 (16mm)

1994     P & Not-P 27:00 (16mm)

1992     Mead Lake 28:00 (16mm)

1990     A Short History of Water 16:00

1989     The Long Take 7:00