2015 Fellows Coordinator: Toby Lee is an artist and scholar working across video, installation, drawing and text. She is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of cultural institutions, cultural citizenship, film festival studies, and expanded documentary. Her work has been shown in numerous venues, including the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2014 Whitney Biennial, Museum of the Moving Image NY, and Flaherty NYC.

Hend Alawadhi is a Visual and Cultural Studies PhD student at the University of Rochester, New York. She is interested in trauma studies and representations of Arab and Middle Eastern culture in film and photography. She works at the intersections of post-colonialism, feminism and gender studies, and archival theory. Alawadhi graduated from Kuwait University in 2008 with a BFA in Graphic Design. She received her MFA in Computer Graphics Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY in 2010. Her recent publications include “Reclaiming the Narrative: The 99 and Muslim Superheroes” and “On What Was, and What Remains: Palestinian Cinema and the Film Archive”.  Alawadhi is also the managing editor of InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, a peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year.

Amahl Bishara is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford 2013), and the director ofAcross Oceans, Among Colleagues, a documentary about the Committee to Protect Journalists' work in the Middle East during the perilous seasons of 2001-2002. She also directed Degrees of Incarceration, a documentary about the impact of political imprisonment on Aida Refugee Camp. Her recent article “Driving While Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientation and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge” analyzes the Palestinian politics of movement in the everyday.

Colin Brant is a filmmaker whose growing body of short 16mm work explores visual rhymes that result from repetitive camera performances, and deal with landscape, movement, and autobiography. Tactile experimentation with the material is at the core of his approach to personal narrative. He is also involved in touring cinema exhibition and interested in cinema as a vehicle for storytelling and criticality within a community. Colin currently works at Bennington College as the Film/Video/Animation technician.

Paul Burke worked as a location scout for films and commercials in Northern California before moving into shooting and editing short videos for non‐profits both in the U.S. and Haiti. He is currently enrolled in the MFA Film program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is working on a short film about the effect of automation on traditional stone sculpting in Carrara, Italy. In addition, he is researching a longer archival project about the impact of Liberation Theology on politics in Haiti in the last 30 years.

Paul Dallas is a Brooklyn-based writer and film programmer with a background in architecture. His interviews, criticism and festival coverage have appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Cinema Scope, Extra Extra, Film Comment,Filmmaker Magazine, Indiewire and Interview Magazine. He was film curator for the inaugural BMW Guggenheim LAB New York (2011) and organized "Cinematic Sites," a weekly film series at the Guggenheim Museum (2013-14). Recently, he curated "Outside In" and "Get Lost" for Van Alen Institute’s Elsewhere Program Series. He is a recipient of a Schindler Architecture Fellowship from the MAK Center for Art + Architecture, Los Angeles, and a graduate of The Cooper Union. He is currently developing a narrative feature with director Frédéric Tcheng.

Aryo Danusiri is a video artist and anthropologist born in Jakarta. His works have been featured at various film festivals and art galleries, including Yamagata, Rotterdam, Mead as well as Hause der Kulturen der Welt, Camera Austria, Ethnographic Terminalia and Whitney Biennial. He is currently a fellow in Sensory Ethnography Lab and Film Study Center at Harvard University to support his doctoral project in Social Anthropology and Critical Media Practice.

Jennifer Deger is an anthropologist, filmmaker and co-founder of Miyarrka Media, a collective of artists and filmmakers based in the remote Aboriginal community of Gapuwiyak in northern Australia. She writes about visual culture, experimental ethnography, the anthropology of art, and indigenous aesthetics includingher book Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Jennifer's creative work with Miyarrka Media includes the documentary films Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit (2012) and Ringtone (2014) and the multimedia installations Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit) (2011) and Gapuwiyak Calling: Phone-Made Media from ArnhemLand (2014).Jennifer is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and research leader at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University.

Emily Drummer is a filmmaker, archivist, and emerging educator who lives and works in rural New York. She makes experimental nonfiction films that address the relationship between personal experience and marginalized histories. Her moving image work utilizes archival materials and alternative analog processes. She recently completed a project on the role of “the usherette” in early American cinemas and is currently at work on a film focused on women readers of pulp magazines from the 1930s and 40s. She received her BA from Hampshire College and will begin her MFA at the University of Iowa this fall.

Maria Dumlao, born in Manila, Philippines, is an artist working in various media, including film, video, sound, and photography.  Her work has been exhibited/screened at Art in General and Momenta Art (NYC), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), The Contemporary Museum (Hawaii) and internationally. She had residencies at Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY, and Wave Farm in Acra, NY. Her collaborative work with Brainstormers appeared and screened at Brooklyn Museum of Art and Bronx Museum of Art and received funding from The Puffin Foundation. She received a BA in Studio Art and Art History at Rutgers College and a MFA in Studio Art at Hunter College-CUNY. Since moving to Philadelphia, she has been involved in various capacities in artists collectives including Vox Populi and is a professor at Bucks CCC (Newtown, PA).

Eric P. Gulliver is a Boston-based editor and producer. Currently, he works as an editor for The OutPost at WGBH, where he produces content for FRONTLINE and American Experience. He has earned over 100 assistant editor credits on numerous national productions. Since 2008, Eric has edited with filmmaker John Gianvito on three documentary features and one short – the most recent of which (FAR FROM AFGHANISTAN, 2012) he co-edited and co-shot. Also in that time, he produced four short films THE LIGHT, FLYING, CONSTRAINTS, and INTEGRO that have screened at U.S. festivals. In 2012, Eric co-founded The Non-Fiction Cartel, a working collaborative whose purpose is to support, create and enhance documentary media making in the New England area, where he serves as Vice-Chair.

Lindsay Catherine Harris is a Brooklyn-based media maker, activist, and educator. She works to create multimedia projects exploring identity, presence, and history. Evoking the Mulatto, a transmedia project exploring black mixed identity in the 21st century though the lens of the history of racial classification in the US, is an on-going passion with major release in 2015. Lindsay has also designed and taught programs in new media, digital storytelling, art, and social justice to young people at museums and community-based orgs around NYC, currently expanding programs at the Brooklyn Museum. She holds a B.A. in Africana Studies & Art from Vassar College and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU.

Florrie James is a painter and film-maker based in Glasgow. Florrie graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2010. Last year Florrie was commissioned by Collective gallery to make the short film Brighthouse, a drama set in the future in East Glasgow. In 2014 Florrie worked with Emilia Muller-Ginorio, towards the film Mountaintop Administration, filmed in locations that are entangled by processes of privatisation and psychic foreclosure. Florrie was awarded the Margaret Tait Residency in Orkney to finish O.K. Rick, in which two women travel around the island taking details for a national census. Along the way their project re-forms as they change the questions asked. Florrie acknowledges that fiction is an indispensable tool rather than a luxury and that it gives us the necessary space to concentrate away from verbal and social languages we are conditioned by.

David Scott Kessler is a multi-disciplined visual artist, illustrator, digital animator and filmmaker.  His first feature length documentary about artist Zoe Strauss was produced by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.  He has gone on to produce and direct several non-traditional documentaries, narrative short films, installations and music videos.David’s current project is an evolving experimental documentary set in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, presented as installations and live musical performances. David also runs Studioscopic, a production company for art, documentary, post production and visual fx.

Adam R. Levine is a filmmaker from London, England whose films and videos deal with hidden histories, vernacular practices and subjective geographies. His work has screened internationally at festivals and galleries including the Vienna International Film Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Éxperimentaux de Paris, Antimatter Film Festival, the Iowa City International Film Festival, Artists' Television Access and TIE-The International Cinema Exposition. He received a BA in Film and English from the University of East Anglia and an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art, Film and Media Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Tiona McClodden is a filmmaker and visual artist. She produces and distributes her work through her film and media imprint, Harriet's Gun Media whose mission is to produce and distribute works of art across a range of media platforms that examine, explore, and critique issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Themes explored in McClodden's films have been social change, social realism, re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography. www.tionam.com

Maricarmen Merino was born in Costa Rica in 1985. She studied Communications at the University of Costa Rica and worked on a number of films there. Since 2010 she studies at the Centro de Cinematografica in Mexico City where she is finishing her major as film director. Her last short film “Bella” has been selected to the Guadalajara Film Festival, Camerimage Festival in Poland, Mill Valley Film Festival, Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival in Bilbao, Icaro Film Festival, and ShortShorts Film Festival in Mexico City where she won the award for Best Director. She is in post-production with her first feature documentary “Where Are You”.

Alexis Mitchell is a Toronto-based media artist and scholar whose videos and installations have shown at festivals and in galleries internationally. Her work uses architectures and objects to queer common understandings of memory, place and belonging. Mitchell received her MFA in Film and Video Production from York University where her thesis video 'CAMP' won the award for Best Upcoming Director at the World Film Festival in Montreal. She also works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat under the name Bambitchell. The duo have exhibited work internationally and recently received the Homebrew Award at the Images Festival for their installation 'Silent Citizen'. Currently, Mitchell is in production on a number of new works and is a PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto.

Michaela O’Brien is a Massachusetts-based documentary artist currently pursuing her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently directing and producing In Crystal Skin, an independent feature-length documentary now in post-production and set for release in the fall of 2015. In Crystal Skin was filmed in Bogotá, Colombia across three years and traces the lives of four individuals challenged by Epidermolysis Bullosa, a severe and inherited skin disorder. Additionally, Michaela is in production on Love Valley, an experimental documentary film set alongside contemporary and archival photographic and collage installations. Love Valley explores American memory and the emotion of forgetting set within a Christian Cowboy utopia turned dystopia in Western North Carolina.

Jason Oppliger is most fascinated by what's just behind the thing we're supposed to be looking at, maybe it’s around the corner. And the things I make often have a sense of observation built from inside, of capturing through the medium itself: acknowledgment of the frame, exploitation of the screen. I make films, sculptures, and installations exploring haptic imagery, organic digitality, human vision, and the cultural detritus of our visually disintegrating urban imprints and their subsequent resurfacing. In my spare time, I dream about climbing mountains and drinking coffee. I am not a vegetarian. My films have played at various festivals including: SXSW, Vail Film Festival, and The Thin Line Documentary Film Festival.

David Romberg studied sculpture at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and became passionate about filmmaking soon thereafter. He began his film career exploring film and video technologies as a visual artist, while at a film residency program at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria. This residency led him to pursue his M.F.A. degree, in Film and Media Arts at Temple University.  David is currently teaching Film Production at Bryn Mawr College and is completing a feature length documentary filmed in Brazil called “Man of The Monkey”.  The film which has been supported by the Tribeca Film Institute’s Latin American Filmmaker Fund, The Princess Grace Foundation and was selected to participate in the 2014 IFP Film Lab.

Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri is an independent documentary filmmaker, born and raised in Tehran, Iran, from Kurdish background.  She produced and directed several personal documentary films about Iran that are distributed by Women Make Movies and Arab Films. Her recent film, Road To Kurdistan (2013) was partially funded by National Geographic’s All Roads Fund.  Her other films include, Women Like Us, portrait of 5 Iranian women and Caught Between Two Worlds, about Iranian immigrants in the U.S. She has produced a number of documentary programs about the Middle East and Iran that were broadcast on PBS and Link TV. She was the series producer for Link TV's Bridge to Iran and Deep Dish TV's 2005 series on the US war in Iraq, which was screened widely and was included in the 2006 Whitney Museum Binennial. She is also a media educator, teaching film and media classes at NYU and Temple University.

Zainab Saleh is a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation examines the relationship between contemporary politics and intermediality in film and comics. She previously worked at the Dubai International Film Festival in their Film Market. Zainab has taught courses on Middle Eastern and Experimental cinema, and is currently the Graduate Advisor for the University's student-run exhibition space, The Hartnett Gallery.

Ekrem Serdar is a filmmaker & programmer from Ankara, Turkey. He completed his MFA at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He frequently shows his work with the Küçük Sinemalar group, and is a founder and programmer of Experimental Response Cinema in Austin, TX.  

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and musician based in San Francisco. Raised in Texas by an Iraqi mother and Yemeni father, she is interested in the multiple narratives that arise from place and displacement. Her short film Amal's Garden, filmed in Kirkuk, Iraq, was an Official Selection of the Cinema du Reel Festival at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2013) and went on to screen in festivals internationally. Prior to filmmaking, she received her Master of City & Regional Planning degree from UC Berkeley in 2009 and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Turkey in 2006. She is currently directing her first feature-length film.

Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi is a writer, researcher and filmmaker. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at New York University with a Certificate in Culture and Media. Her short documentary A Correspondence (2014) premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival and is currently screening on the festival circuit. The film narrates intertwining personal stories enmeshed in the political upheaval of the second world war.

Natasha Suresh Raheja is a New York-based filmmaker. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at New York University with a Certificate in Culture and Media. Her research interests are in the areas of migration, movement, and belonging. She is the founder and co-director of the Sindhi Voices Project, a participatory media and oral history initiative. Natasha's award-winning short documentary Cast in India (2014) on the making of NYC manhole covers world premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival and is currently screening on the festival circuit. Natasha is also a 2015 Southern Exposure Documentary Fellow.

Gabriela Watson Aurazo is Brazilian of Afro-Peruvian descent; she is a multi-media producer and activist based in Philadelphia. She directed the documentary We, Afro-Peruvians (Brazil, Peru, 2012, 45min) screened in USA, Latin American and Africa. Her research and productions are related to black culture: Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Peruvian identity, African Diaspora, black women, media and education. She is recipient of the 2014 Scholarship from the Black Women Film Network - BWFN, Atlanta, GA. Gabriela was awarded the Dean’s Grant from Temple University and she is a 2015 Flaherty Seminar Fellow and a 2014 Fellow recipient of The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Currently Gabriela is a MFA candidate in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village with his wife, daughter, and three cats. His ongoing film series, The Addresses, focuses on the relationship between the intimate and the uncanny within domestic spaces. Central to this process is an investigation of the visual agency of the (un)built form and the manner in which it implicates a history of familial trauma. His practice also considers natural spaces that are defined by the vitality of matter and its transfer of force. He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA and a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists. He has shown his 16mm films and digital videos in film festivals, microcinemas, and galleries worldwide.