Rosa Barotsi is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy). She recently concluded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action at the Catholic University of Milan with the data-based project CineAF: Women’s Films in Italy (1964-2015) on gender inequality in the Italian film industry. Since 2021, she has been one of the coordinators of The Purple Meridians joint project. She received her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2014. She has previously held a postdoctoral position at the ICI Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry, where she developed a project on Slow cinema and debt. Along with Clio Nicastro and Saima Akhtar, she co-founded the In Front of the Factory research collective in 2016. Her research focuses on the intersections between film, gender and work, with an emphasis on Italian and Greek cinema.
Ariel Baska is a filmmaker, journalist, and academic author. Her first film, Our First Priority (2022), was an Official Selection of Final Girls Berlin and Frightfest UK, and won the Disability Advocacy Award from Superfest Disability Film Festival. Her first animated film, She’s Never Been a Bird Before (2021), was featured at the Engauge Experimental Film Festival. She has received multiple scholarships from Sundance Collab, was a speaker at SXSW 2022, and has produced a number of documentaries and horror shorts. Her podcast, Ride the Omnibus, is parked at the intersection of pop culture and social justice. More information at arielbaska.com.
Daniel Bird is the co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk. He directs the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, which is concerned with film preservation and restoration in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Recently he has co-produced restorations of Franciszka & Stefan Themerson’s Europa (1931), Stephen Sayadian’s Dr Caligari (1989), and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
Kat Ellinger is an author and film critic. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Diabolique Magazine, a disc producer for Radiance Films, and co-director of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin (2022). She is the author of the ‘Devil’s Advocates’ volume on Harry Kümel's 1971 film Daughters of Darkness (2020) and All the Colours of Sergio Martino from Arrow Books.
Alex Fitch presents the UK's only monthly broadcast radio show on comics – Panel Borders – on the Arts Council Radio Station in London, Resonance 104.4 FM. Alex has been widely published on the topics of comics and film, by Intellect, McFarland, the University Presses of Mississippi and Chicago, Cambridge Scholars and The Conversation. He is an award winning lecturer in Architecture, Visual Communication, and Film Studies at the University of Brighton, where he is pursuing a PhD on 'The Representation of Architecture in Comic Books'.
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her most recent book, Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia UP, 2021) addresses Southeast Asian horror, gender, and postcolonial politics. She is also the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2011), which won the BAFTSS best book award, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006), as well as co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), winner of the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács book award, and co-editor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (OUP, 2010). In 2019-20, she was the recipient of a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She publishes widely on world cinema, gender, sexuality, and political histories.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist and an author, academic and film critic from Melbourne, Australia. She has published nine books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics, including the recently revised Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011/2021), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), books on Dario Argento’s Suspiria (2015), Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (2017) and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (2018), Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (2019), 1000 Women in Horror 1895-2018 (2020), and The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (2021). She is on the editorial board for the University of Wales Press series Horror Studies, and a member of the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies (LA/NYC/London). Alexandra holds a PhD in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University. She is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and a top critic at Rotten Tomatoes.
Jay McRoy is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside. He is the author of Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema (Rodopi, 2008), the editor of Japanese Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), and the co-editor, with Richard J Hand, of Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 2007). His most recent book, also co-edited with Richard J Hand, is Gothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Cameron Mitchell is a filmmaker, film festival programmer/juror, and teacher. His films have premiered in over 20 countries worldwide with his most recent work ‘Elsa’ about Deafblind author and fencer Elsa Sjunneson is premiering internationally on PBS. His first narrative film, The Co–Op (2021), was an Official Selection at Slamdance for its inaugural Unstoppable program which focuses on disability films and disabled filmmakers. His work has been featured on Netflix and in Rolling Stone and Variety. You can learn more about Cameron and his current projects at www.cameronsmitchell.com.
Alan Moore is Britain's most acclaimed comic book writer, providing the scripts for such titles as V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Halo Jones (1984-1986), Watchmen (1986-1987), Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), Miracleman (1982-1989), From Hell (1991-1998), Lost Girls (1991-2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1989-2019). His short film series Show Pieces (2012) culminated in the feature film The Show (2021), both directed by Mitch Jenkins, and show a fantastical underbelly to his hometown of Northampton, which also features as the location of his first short story collection Voice of the Fire (1996) and novel Jerusalem (2016). His second short story collection Illuminations was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
Sharon Ndoen is a PhD Candidate at the National University of Singapore. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation focusing on anti-Communist gender propaganda in Indonesian horror films produced during the Soeharto regime (1966-1998). She is the author of ‘The “Monstrous-Feminine” as Anti-Communist Propaganda Tool: Invisible State Violence and Psychological Warfare in Soeharto Era Folkloric Horror Films’ (2022), which was presented at the Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12) in Kyoto, Japan. With an academic background in cultural anthropology, development sociology, Indonesian studies, cultural studies, and film studies, her interests sit at many intersections. These interests are – but are not limited to – gender and feminist issues, power relations, de/coloniality, media representation, Indonesia, politics, and history.
Alison Peirse is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores women’s invisible or overlooked contributions to the production of the horror film genre, thus working at the intersection of production studies and feminist film historiographies. Her books include Rewriting Television (2024), Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (2020), Korean Horror Cinema (2013) and After Dracula: the 1930s Horror Film (2013). Her books and films have won awards around the world, and Women Make Horror was the inspiration for the ‘Women Make Horror’ season at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the summer of 2022.
Rabia Sitabi is a film programmer, marketing director, and pop culture expert with Asian and African roots. She has worked with many international film festivals, and is currently the Director of Marketing for Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, where she is based. She regularly appears on Dutch television and radio programs as a pop culture expert, and has spoken at SXSW. In 2022, she was the Diversity Ambassador to Sundance for the Film Festival Alliance. She co-hosts two podcasts, the Cultured Curators and Ride the Omnibus. More information at rpish.com.
Alison Taylor (Ali) teaches at Bond University, Australia. She is the author of the ‘Devil’s Advocates’ monograph on Possession (LUP 2022) and Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema (EUP 2017), and is currently co-writing a book on the work of Nicolas Winding Refn for SUNY’s Horizons of Cinema series.
Émilie von Garan is a Toronto-based critical writer and researcher exploring the intersection of gender, technologies and architecture in film and moving image art. She holds an MA in Art History from OCAD University and is currently a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the instability of the gaze in post-war Italian cinema through the works of filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Dario Argento. Her recent publications include ‘Appropriating Cinema: On Networked Constellations and Posthuman Resonance in Janice Gurney’s The Newspaper’ from Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art (YYZBooks) and ‘Argento’s Evil Eye: Movements, Containments, and the Giallo’s Possessive Gaze’ in the forthcoming Bloodstained Narratives (University of Mississippi Press).
Lydia Wong-Plain holds an MA with Distinction in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. Before her engagement in the Arts, she managed investment portfolios crossing between finance and the arts for an international clientele. Since 2019, Lydia has been pursuing her PhD at NTU where her research focuses on developing new trajectories between the arts and the community through critique of cultural institutions in tandem with cultural policy. Her research is supported by the NTU research scholarship. In professional practice, Lydia is an adjunct lecturer at both Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore and has worked as a writer, project manager and curator.
Pea Woodruff is a writer, director, and producer, with extensive experience in camera and electrical departments in various roles for both television and film. She is currently finishing post-production on her film Hunting Wolves, which she wrote and directed.
Ariel Baska is a filmmaker, journalist, and academic author. Her first film, Our First Priority (2022), was an Official Selection of Final Girls Berlin and Frightfest UK, and won the Disability Advocacy Award from Superfest Disability Film Festival. Her first animated film, She’s Never Been a Bird Before (2021), was featured at the Engauge Experimental Film Festival. She has received multiple scholarships from Sundance Collab, was a speaker at SXSW 2022, and has produced a number of documentaries and horror shorts. Her podcast, Ride the Omnibus, is parked at the intersection of pop culture and social justice. More information at arielbaska.com.
Daniel Bird is the co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk. He directs the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, which is concerned with film preservation and restoration in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Recently he has co-produced restorations of Franciszka & Stefan Themerson’s Europa (1931), Stephen Sayadian’s Dr Caligari (1989), and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
Kat Ellinger is an author and film critic. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Diabolique Magazine, a disc producer for Radiance Films, and co-director of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin (2022). She is the author of the ‘Devil’s Advocates’ volume on Harry Kümel's 1971 film Daughters of Darkness (2020) and All the Colours of Sergio Martino from Arrow Books.
Alex Fitch presents the UK's only monthly broadcast radio show on comics – Panel Borders – on the Arts Council Radio Station in London, Resonance 104.4 FM. Alex has been widely published on the topics of comics and film, by Intellect, McFarland, the University Presses of Mississippi and Chicago, Cambridge Scholars and The Conversation. He is an award winning lecturer in Architecture, Visual Communication, and Film Studies at the University of Brighton, where he is pursuing a PhD on 'The Representation of Architecture in Comic Books'.
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her most recent book, Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia UP, 2021) addresses Southeast Asian horror, gender, and postcolonial politics. She is also the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2011), which won the BAFTSS best book award, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006), as well as co-author of Queer Cinema in the World (Duke UP, 2016), winner of the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács book award, and co-editor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (OUP, 2010). In 2019-20, she was the recipient of a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She publishes widely on world cinema, gender, sexuality, and political histories.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist and an author, academic and film critic from Melbourne, Australia. She has published nine books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics, including the recently revised Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (2011/2021), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), books on Dario Argento’s Suspiria (2015), Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (2017) and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (2018), Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (2019), 1000 Women in Horror 1895-2018 (2020), and The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (2021). She is on the editorial board for the University of Wales Press series Horror Studies, and a member of the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies (LA/NYC/London). Alexandra holds a PhD in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University. She is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and a top critic at Rotten Tomatoes.
Jay McRoy is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside. He is the author of Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema (Rodopi, 2008), the editor of Japanese Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), and the co-editor, with Richard J Hand, of Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 2007). His most recent book, also co-edited with Richard J Hand, is Gothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Cameron Mitchell is a filmmaker, film festival programmer/juror, and teacher. His films have premiered in over 20 countries worldwide with his most recent work ‘Elsa’ about Deafblind author and fencer Elsa Sjunneson is premiering internationally on PBS. His first narrative film, The Co–Op (2021), was an Official Selection at Slamdance for its inaugural Unstoppable program which focuses on disability films and disabled filmmakers. His work has been featured on Netflix and in Rolling Stone and Variety. You can learn more about Cameron and his current projects at www.cameronsmitchell.com.
Alan Moore is Britain's most acclaimed comic book writer, providing the scripts for such titles as V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Halo Jones (1984-1986), Watchmen (1986-1987), Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), Miracleman (1982-1989), From Hell (1991-1998), Lost Girls (1991-2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1989-2019). His short film series Show Pieces (2012) culminated in the feature film The Show (2021), both directed by Mitch Jenkins, and show a fantastical underbelly to his hometown of Northampton, which also features as the location of his first short story collection Voice of the Fire (1996) and novel Jerusalem (2016). His second short story collection Illuminations was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
Sharon Ndoen is a PhD Candidate at the National University of Singapore. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation focusing on anti-Communist gender propaganda in Indonesian horror films produced during the Soeharto regime (1966-1998). She is the author of ‘The “Monstrous-Feminine” as Anti-Communist Propaganda Tool: Invisible State Violence and Psychological Warfare in Soeharto Era Folkloric Horror Films’ (2022), which was presented at the Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12) in Kyoto, Japan. With an academic background in cultural anthropology, development sociology, Indonesian studies, cultural studies, and film studies, her interests sit at many intersections. These interests are – but are not limited to – gender and feminist issues, power relations, de/coloniality, media representation, Indonesia, politics, and history.
Alison Peirse is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores women’s invisible or overlooked contributions to the production of the horror film genre, thus working at the intersection of production studies and feminist film historiographies. Her books include Rewriting Television (2024), Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (2020), Korean Horror Cinema (2013) and After Dracula: the 1930s Horror Film (2013). Her books and films have won awards around the world, and Women Make Horror was the inspiration for the ‘Women Make Horror’ season at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the summer of 2022.
Rabia Sitabi is a film programmer, marketing director, and pop culture expert with Asian and African roots. She has worked with many international film festivals, and is currently the Director of Marketing for Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, where she is based. She regularly appears on Dutch television and radio programs as a pop culture expert, and has spoken at SXSW. In 2022, she was the Diversity Ambassador to Sundance for the Film Festival Alliance. She co-hosts two podcasts, the Cultured Curators and Ride the Omnibus. More information at rpish.com.
Alison Taylor (Ali) teaches at Bond University, Australia. She is the author of the ‘Devil’s Advocates’ monograph on Possession (LUP 2022) and Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema (EUP 2017), and is currently co-writing a book on the work of Nicolas Winding Refn for SUNY’s Horizons of Cinema series.
Émilie von Garan is a Toronto-based critical writer and researcher exploring the intersection of gender, technologies and architecture in film and moving image art. She holds an MA in Art History from OCAD University and is currently a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the instability of the gaze in post-war Italian cinema through the works of filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Dario Argento. Her recent publications include ‘Appropriating Cinema: On Networked Constellations and Posthuman Resonance in Janice Gurney’s The Newspaper’ from Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art (YYZBooks) and ‘Argento’s Evil Eye: Movements, Containments, and the Giallo’s Possessive Gaze’ in the forthcoming Bloodstained Narratives (University of Mississippi Press).
Lydia Wong-Plain holds an MA with Distinction in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. Before her engagement in the Arts, she managed investment portfolios crossing between finance and the arts for an international clientele. Since 2019, Lydia has been pursuing her PhD at NTU where her research focuses on developing new trajectories between the arts and the community through critique of cultural institutions in tandem with cultural policy. Her research is supported by the NTU research scholarship. In professional practice, Lydia is an adjunct lecturer at both Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore and has worked as a writer, project manager and curator.
Pea Woodruff is a writer, director, and producer, with extensive experience in camera and electrical departments in various roles for both television and film. She is currently finishing post-production on her film Hunting Wolves, which she wrote and directed.