John Atkinson is the Editorial Lead for the Cine-Excess Journal and a co-organiser of the Cine-Excess conference. In his publishing career he has worked for, amongst others, BFI Publishing, and was the proprietor of Auteur Publishing, where he initiated and commissioned the acclaimed ‘Devil’s Advocates’ series of books on horror and cult cinema, now published by Liverpool University Press.
Maximilian Breckwoldt is an independent scholar and cultural worker with a master's degree from Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. The topic of their thesis, titled On the transformative aesthetics of the posthuman gothic in the horror film of the eighties - the AIDS monster in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, led them to speak for the first time at an international conference at Cine Excess in 2023. Maximilian is currently employed at Salzgeber, a Queer film distributor based in Berlin and freelances at film festivals, including the Festival of Animation Berlin and the Queerfilmfestival. Both in 2023 and 2024, they held workshops on Film and Genre Theory at the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg. As a researcher Maximilian is interested in the Affect Theory of film, Posthumanism, Queer film cultures and cult cinema.
Rohini Chakraborty is currently a PhD student at Arizona State University, USA. A postgraduate in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (India), Rohini pursued an MPhil degree in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. From 2016 to 2018, she also worked extensively in the field of rural education among marginalized communities in remote areas of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India as a teacher at VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for the economically underprivileged, meritorious students of rural India and an initiative of the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Her areas of interest are Indigeneity, Education, Film and Media, and Gender Studies.
Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of eight books, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993, an expanded second edition 2024); Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (MUP, 2005); Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time & Sexual Display in The Cinema (2009); Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in The Anthropocene (2017) and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022). She has made several documentary films including the landmark Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion (1975), recently restored by the National Film & Sound Archive. Barbara has been invited to participate in international research events, including at the Courtauld Institute (UK), the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of the Sciences (US), and the Freud Institute, London.
Iliana Cuellar is studying for a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, where she also works as a teaching assistant. She has presented on the subject of food on film at multiple conferences as well as on the films of Claire Denis and Agnes Varda.
Elinor Dolliver is a PhD candidate at Cambridge's Centre for Film and Screen, where she researches the intersections between horror cinema and folklore. Her current research revolves around the meaningful parallels between horror cinema and folklore, focusing particularly on the idea that the folk and fairy story is not lost alongside pre-literature cultures, but rather survives in modern filmic reincarnations that maintain the vital social functions of folklore by reinforcing social norms and articulating popular cultural preoccupations.
Lumi (Lu) Etienne is a film scholar, guest lecturer and festival curator. Much of their work features unconventional queer and trans filmmaking. They hold an MA (Distinction) in Film Studies from the University of Sussex, and they've written for Spectacular Optical Press and Arrow Academy, among other publications.
Marine Galiné holds a PhD in Irish studies entitled The representation of women and femininity in nineteenth-century Irish gothic fiction. She is a teaching fellow in English at the Campus des Comtes de Champagne (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne). She is also interested in the transdisciplinary use of the gothic in films and series. Her recent publications include ‘The 1798 Rebellion: Gender Tensions and Femininity in the Irish Gothic’ (Review of Irish Studies in Europe 2.2 [2018]) and ‘Liminality and Generic Playfulness in Gerald Griffin's “The Brown Man” (1827)’ (The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique. Cambridge Scholars Publishing [2021]). She has also published on William Carleton, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Guillermo del Toro, and co-edited a collection of postgraduate essays on the topic of ‘body and crisis’ at the Presses Universitaires de Reims in 2018.
Xavier Mendik is Professor of Cult Cinema Studies at Birmingham City University, from where he also runs the Cine-Excess International Film Festival. He is the author/editor/co-editor of ten books on cult and horror cinema including Shocking Cinema of the 70s (2022 [co-edited with Julian Petley]), Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress (2015), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (2012) and BFI Screen Guides:100 Cult Movies. (2011 [Co-authored, with Ernest Mathijs). Xavier Mendik has also completed several documentaries on cult film traditions and is currently completing a film project which examines images of rural communities within American horror cinema.
Lakkaya Palmer is a filmmaker and a fourth-year film studies PhD student at University College London. Her research focuses on representations of masculinity and fatherhood in American horror cinema. Her primary research interests include social and cultural history, representations of the occult, family, gender, sexuality and race in genre cinema.
Dr. Joy C. Schaefer is a transnational feminist film scholar and inclusive online educator. Her work on the representation of marginalized social identities in cinema has been published in JCMS; Quarterly Review of Film & Video; Studies in European Cinema; Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture; and All in the Mind: Adaptations of Mental and Cognitive Disability in Popular Media (Lexington Books). She is an Affiliate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University and a Language Teacher at One Schoolhouse.
Daniel Sheppard is Visiting Lecturer in Film at Birmingham City University where he recently earned his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies. He is Associate Editor of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Associate Director of Cine-Excess International Film Festival and Conference.
Emily Smith (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham researching the hauntological spectre of the abject Witch in 20th century American horror. Her research interests include the abject, adaptation, feminism, politics, and the occult.
Valeria Villegas Lindvall, PhD, specializes in Latin American horror cinema with a feminist and decolonial focus. She is Reviews Editor for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and member of the advisory board of the MAI Imprint at Punctum Books. She has collaborated in several publications, most prominently as a co-editor, writer and translator at Rolling Stone Mexico, as well as numerous volumes, such as Women Make Horror (2020), The Body Onscreen in the Digital Age (2021), Folk horror: New Global Pathways (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024). She is also an active collaborator for physical media with Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse.
Dr Valentina Vitali is Professor of Digital Arts at Birmingham City University. Her research explores the intersection of economics, history and film aesthetics from a comparative perspective. Publications include Capital and Popular Cinema (MUP), Hindi Action Cinema (OUP), and Theorising National Cinema (BFI, co-edited with Paul Willemen). She has edited a special issue of BioScope on South Asian contemporary women’s cinema, and curated, among other screenings, Contemporary South Asian Films by Women (FACT, Liverpool), Alia Syed: Recent Works (Whitechapel Gallery, London), and Award-winning Docs from Myanmar (Close-Up Cinema, London). Valentina is currently working on a AHRC-funded project on women in the Indian and British film industries.
Maximilian Breckwoldt is an independent scholar and cultural worker with a master's degree from Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. The topic of their thesis, titled On the transformative aesthetics of the posthuman gothic in the horror film of the eighties - the AIDS monster in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, led them to speak for the first time at an international conference at Cine Excess in 2023. Maximilian is currently employed at Salzgeber, a Queer film distributor based in Berlin and freelances at film festivals, including the Festival of Animation Berlin and the Queerfilmfestival. Both in 2023 and 2024, they held workshops on Film and Genre Theory at the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg. As a researcher Maximilian is interested in the Affect Theory of film, Posthumanism, Queer film cultures and cult cinema.
Rohini Chakraborty is currently a PhD student at Arizona State University, USA. A postgraduate in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (India), Rohini pursued an MPhil degree in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. From 2016 to 2018, she also worked extensively in the field of rural education among marginalized communities in remote areas of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India as a teacher at VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for the economically underprivileged, meritorious students of rural India and an initiative of the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Her areas of interest are Indigeneity, Education, Film and Media, and Gender Studies.
Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of eight books, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993, an expanded second edition 2024); Phallic Panic: Film, Horror & the Primal Uncanny (MUP, 2005); Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time & Sexual Display in The Cinema (2009); Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in The Anthropocene (2017) and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022). She has made several documentary films including the landmark Homosexuality: A Film for Discussion (1975), recently restored by the National Film & Sound Archive. Barbara has been invited to participate in international research events, including at the Courtauld Institute (UK), the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of the Sciences (US), and the Freud Institute, London.
Iliana Cuellar is studying for a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, where she also works as a teaching assistant. She has presented on the subject of food on film at multiple conferences as well as on the films of Claire Denis and Agnes Varda.
Elinor Dolliver is a PhD candidate at Cambridge's Centre for Film and Screen, where she researches the intersections between horror cinema and folklore. Her current research revolves around the meaningful parallels between horror cinema and folklore, focusing particularly on the idea that the folk and fairy story is not lost alongside pre-literature cultures, but rather survives in modern filmic reincarnations that maintain the vital social functions of folklore by reinforcing social norms and articulating popular cultural preoccupations.
Lumi (Lu) Etienne is a film scholar, guest lecturer and festival curator. Much of their work features unconventional queer and trans filmmaking. They hold an MA (Distinction) in Film Studies from the University of Sussex, and they've written for Spectacular Optical Press and Arrow Academy, among other publications.
Marine Galiné holds a PhD in Irish studies entitled The representation of women and femininity in nineteenth-century Irish gothic fiction. She is a teaching fellow in English at the Campus des Comtes de Champagne (University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne). She is also interested in the transdisciplinary use of the gothic in films and series. Her recent publications include ‘The 1798 Rebellion: Gender Tensions and Femininity in the Irish Gothic’ (Review of Irish Studies in Europe 2.2 [2018]) and ‘Liminality and Generic Playfulness in Gerald Griffin's “The Brown Man” (1827)’ (The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique. Cambridge Scholars Publishing [2021]). She has also published on William Carleton, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Guillermo del Toro, and co-edited a collection of postgraduate essays on the topic of ‘body and crisis’ at the Presses Universitaires de Reims in 2018.
Xavier Mendik is Professor of Cult Cinema Studies at Birmingham City University, from where he also runs the Cine-Excess International Film Festival. He is the author/editor/co-editor of ten books on cult and horror cinema including Shocking Cinema of the 70s (2022 [co-edited with Julian Petley]), Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress (2015), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (2012) and BFI Screen Guides:100 Cult Movies. (2011 [Co-authored, with Ernest Mathijs). Xavier Mendik has also completed several documentaries on cult film traditions and is currently completing a film project which examines images of rural communities within American horror cinema.
Lakkaya Palmer is a filmmaker and a fourth-year film studies PhD student at University College London. Her research focuses on representations of masculinity and fatherhood in American horror cinema. Her primary research interests include social and cultural history, representations of the occult, family, gender, sexuality and race in genre cinema.
Dr. Joy C. Schaefer is a transnational feminist film scholar and inclusive online educator. Her work on the representation of marginalized social identities in cinema has been published in JCMS; Quarterly Review of Film & Video; Studies in European Cinema; Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture; and All in the Mind: Adaptations of Mental and Cognitive Disability in Popular Media (Lexington Books). She is an Affiliate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University and a Language Teacher at One Schoolhouse.
Daniel Sheppard is Visiting Lecturer in Film at Birmingham City University where he recently earned his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies. He is Associate Editor of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Associate Director of Cine-Excess International Film Festival and Conference.
Emily Smith (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham researching the hauntological spectre of the abject Witch in 20th century American horror. Her research interests include the abject, adaptation, feminism, politics, and the occult.
Valeria Villegas Lindvall, PhD, specializes in Latin American horror cinema with a feminist and decolonial focus. She is Reviews Editor for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and member of the advisory board of the MAI Imprint at Punctum Books. She has collaborated in several publications, most prominently as a co-editor, writer and translator at Rolling Stone Mexico, as well as numerous volumes, such as Women Make Horror (2020), The Body Onscreen in the Digital Age (2021), Folk horror: New Global Pathways (2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024). She is also an active collaborator for physical media with Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and Powerhouse.
Dr Valentina Vitali is Professor of Digital Arts at Birmingham City University. Her research explores the intersection of economics, history and film aesthetics from a comparative perspective. Publications include Capital and Popular Cinema (MUP), Hindi Action Cinema (OUP), and Theorising National Cinema (BFI, co-edited with Paul Willemen). She has edited a special issue of BioScope on South Asian contemporary women’s cinema, and curated, among other screenings, Contemporary South Asian Films by Women (FACT, Liverpool), Alia Syed: Recent Works (Whitechapel Gallery, London), and Award-winning Docs from Myanmar (Close-Up Cinema, London). Valentina is currently working on a AHRC-funded project on women in the Indian and British film industries.