Team

Janine Marchessault is Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research engages with the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR). She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group. Her latest project is an expanded cinema project, Outer Worlds (outerworlds.org) – commissioning five IMAX films by artists, which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 and will begin touring soon. She is the Director of Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2018–2024 counterarchive.ca), a research collaboration involving more than 20 community and artist run archives devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ2+, immigrant, and women’s communities. Her most recent monograph is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Ecologies, Utopias (MIT 2017) and co-edited collection Process Cinema: Handmade film in the Digital Age (MQUP 2019).

Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She has published widely on cultural politics, the visual and experimental media arts since the 1980s. She is co-editor of In Search of Expo 67 (2020, with Lesley Johnstone), a companion for the exhibition at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal for the 50^th anniversary of Expo 67. Recent publications include “Into the Archive With Joyce Wieland: Bill’s Hat (1967),” and her conversation with filmmaker, Alanis Obomsawin, “Before I made films, I was singing,” in Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework (Berlin: HKW/Prestel).

Allison Whitney is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. Her research foci include the history of film technology, local film culture and oral history practices, sound studies, dynamics of race, class, and gender in film genres, and film studies pedagogy. Her IMAX research ranges from her dissertation The Eye of Daedalus: A History and Theory of IMAX Cinema to publications on IMAX in the films of Christopher Nolan, the Star Wars franchise, and IMAX 3D films on lunar exploration. She received the Society for Cinema Studies Distinguished Pedagogy Award in 2020, and has published extensively on teaching film and media studies, particularly in relationship to regional film cultures, oral history, and community engagement. As a horror scholar she co-founded the Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and she has published on emotion and spectatorship in horror pedagogy, the gender dynamics of the cell phone as a narrative device, and race, sonic labor, and the figure of the telephone operator in contemporary film.

Oliver Husain is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. Husain’s projects often begin with fragment of history, a rumor, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, and special effects — to animate his research and charm or fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups. His film Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail (2019), filmed in Imax 3D format, takes the Keong Emas (The Golden Snail) Imax theatre in Jakarta as its starting point. The film combines research into the building’s function for state propaganda during the Suharto regime and into the ecological consequences of the spread of the Golden Apple Snail, an invasive species in Indonesia. His solo projects – as well as collaborations and collective productions – have been shown in numerous international exhibitions and film festivals including: Heni Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2022); Bemis Center, Omaha (2021); Stamps Gallery, Ann Arbor (2020); Mumok Vienna (2019); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Forum Expanded, Berlinale Film Festival, Berlin (2017). His website is www.husain.de

Jessica Mulvogue is a Lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She completed a postdoc at the Collaborative Research Centre on Otium at the University of Freiburg, Germany and her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at York University, Canada. Her two main areas of research are the history and theory of immersive, expanded cinemas and the exigencies of environmental cinema in the period of climate change catastrophe. Jessica obtained her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at York University.  Her publications include essays in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change (eds.TJ Demos, Subhankar Banerjee, Emily Eliza Scott), The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw), and Transformations Journal.

Cameron Moneo is a postdoctoral visitor to the IMAX: A Transnational History project at York University. He holds a PhD in cinema and media studies from York University and is a former co-chair of the Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group at SCMS. He has published with the Canadian Film Institute and in INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, JCMS, and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies (forthcoming). His other projects currently include the design of a video game about local film culture in his home city of Saskatoon/Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis.