Arts & SciencePhD Student
Vince Ha is a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. His research centers on two core themes: diasporic identities and queer archival methods. Currently, he is investigating transnational media and its impact on queer diasporic sociality, with special attention to homoerotic representation in Asian cinema
Brandon Hocura is a sound artist, filmmaker, writer, and archivist. He is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance 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.
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.
Hilary Jay is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. Prior to this, she completed her B.A. in Philosophy and Art History at McGill and her M.A. in SCCS at Queen’s in 2022. Her research is engaged with the contemporary relevance of archives, time-based media, and curation. Hilary is also currently a Research Assistant in the Vulnerable Media Lab.
Naomi Jaye is an artist, filmmaker, educator and PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program at Queens University. Naomi's main research interest lies in research-creation, through which she explores the architecture of installation and immersive experiences. Naomi holds a MFA from York University and is a lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University.
William Jennings is a PhD student in the Film and Media department. He holds an MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies from ³ÉÈË´óƬ, and a BA in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Victoria. Interests include slow cinema, continental philosophy, memory, materiality, and new media. Not to be confused with the 41st US Secretary of State.
Sana Kazemirashid (she/her) is a PhD student in the Screen Culture and Curatorial Studies program. With a BSc in Computer Engineering and an MA in Animation, she is a filmmaker and animator whose doctoral research explores women’s emotions, narratives, and struggles through immersive and innovative storytelling.
Leila Khalilzadeh is a PhD student in Film and Media at Queen’s University. Leila's work examines memory, migration, gendered histories, and diasporic screen media through documentary, fiction, and animation. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Cinema in Iran and working as a filmmaker, researcher, writer, and lecturer, she immigrated to Canada in 2015, completed an MFA in Film Production at Concordia University, and developed a sustained research-creation practice. Her films have screened at international festivals including the Berlinale, ReykjavÃk International Film Festival, and Festival du nouveau cinéma, and she was selected for Berlinale Talents in 2021. She has also developed curatorial projects such as Spotlight on Iranian Art Films (Festival International du Film sur l'Art, 2020), a digital curation for MOMENTA Biennale (2020), and A Retrospective of Iranian Short Films (Concordia University, 2018). Bringing together moving-image production, curation, and archival research, her current interests focus on counter-archival approaches and the recovery of underrepresented histories in Iranian and diasporic media cultures.
Jung-Ah Kim is an artist-curator, researcher, and PhD candidate whose work bridges media and textiles through conceptual and material experimentation and re-enactment. She uses weaving as an entry point to explore broader questions of technology, media, and culture. Her research engages with the history of computing, feminist media critique, and the politics of remembering and cultural amnesia embedded in diasporic objects such as a Korean carpet discovered in a Canadian museum. Through the reconstruction of an ancient loom, she examines the tacit knowledge produced through hands-on creation and the intersections of craft, technology, and cultural memory.
Michele Lawson is an internationally recognized journalist and social justice media producer. Since graduating from Queen’s University 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).
I am a PhD Student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Program. I have been a practicing artist for 35 years focusing on film and video installation art, queer and feminist space making and public installations. I have spent most of my career working in artist run culture and maverick institutions such as FAG Feminist Art Gallery, The Film Farm, Vtape and now FAR Feminist Art Residency. My 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 Queen’s University, 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 .