Season 21 

Alia Ayman makes and curates film and video and lives between Cairo and New York. She is the cofounder of Zawya, an art-house cinema located Cairo and a doctoral student at NYU where she is working towards a dissertation on decoloniality, difference and the global circulation of documentary images.

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. His work spans experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, history, culture, and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. His work has screened nationally and internationally, and his 3rd short film, "At Home but Not At Home," makes its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2020. In 2017, he graduated with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT, and in 2016 was a resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City.

Season 20

Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and programmer based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films have appeared at NYFF, SXSW, Hong Kong, Dhaka, Mumbai, and San Francisco International Film Festivals, DokuFest, Onion City, Orphans Film Symposium, The Exploratorium, and elsewhere. For the past five years she has co-programmed the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud, and guest-curated programs at Union Docs, The Getty, Museum of the Museum Image, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and was recently named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine.

Mathilde Walker-Billaud is a curator and cultural producer based in New York City. She worked as an editor, programmer and manager for Centre National de la Danse, company nora chipaumire, Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, UnionDocs, and Villa Gillet (a center for fiction and non-fiction based in Lyon, France). Walker-Billaud programs and hosts at UnionDocs an ongoing interdisciplinary series of events about spectatorship entitled "What You Get Is What You See." Her writing and voice have appeared in BOMB Magazine and the podcast Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything.

Season 19

Mary Helena Clark (1983, Santee, South Carolina) is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work has recently been exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, DOCUMENT, Chicago, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, and at festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival. She has programmed screenings at JOAN, The Nightingale, Altman Siegel, and Bridget Donahue.

Alexander Stewart (1981, Mobile, Alabama) received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His short films have screened internationally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 25FPS, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and ImageForum in Japan. He is co-curator of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, which screens annually in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. He curated the monthly screening series at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago from 2006 to 2013. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Experimental Animation program at CalArts.

SEASON 18

Dessane Lopez Cassell is a writer, curator, and film programmer based in New York. She has held curatorial positions and internships at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, Mass MoCA, the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM), and Luhring Augustine. Cassell has organized curatorial projects for BAMcinématek, MoMA Film, and the AMAM, and has produced audio and radio projects for The Studio Museum, Bay FM (South Africa), Creative X (South Africa) and Roskilde Festival (Denmark). At the core of her curatorial practice are interests in hybrid media and the merging of the contemporary with the archive. An alumna of the U.S. Fulbright program, Cassell is also a graduate of Oberlin College, where she studied Art History and Africana Studies.

SEASON 17

Almudena Escobar López is a Spanish archivist, film curator, and scholar. She is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation explores the notion of collaborative aesthetics in relation to ideas of artistic cooperativism. She has published essays in MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage: the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Little White Lies, and Desistfilm Magazine, among others. She was a University of Rochester Film and Media Studies fellow for the 60th Flaherty Film Seminar in 2014. She has collaborated with the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the London Spanish Film Festival, and the East End Film Festival of the London International Film Festival. She is co-programmer of the collective screening project On-Film, serves on the Advisory Board of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY, and on the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY.

Almudena Escobar López’ initial research was supported by the Public Humanities Fellowship at the New York Council for the Humanities. Public Humanities Fellowship website

Herb Schellenberger is a curator and writer originally from Philadelphia and based in London. He has curated screenings at institutions such as Arnolfini (Bristol), Irish Film Institute, Light Industry (Brooklyn), Lightbox Film Center (Philadelphia), LUX (London), New York University, Taipei Center for Contemporary Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). Since 2016, he has been Associate Programmer for Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (Berwick-upon-Tweed, UK). He is a graduate of the Central Saint Martins/LUX MRes Moving Image programme, has lectured on film and contemporary art at museums, universities and art spaces, and has written for publications including Art-Agenda, Art Monthly and The Brooklyn Rail. He curated the series “Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s + 1980s” which premiered at Tate Modern and is touring internationally. In 2018, he will curate an exhibition at The Maslow Collection (Scranton, PA).

SEASON 16

Maori Karmael Holmes is founder of the BlackStar Film Festival (2012-present) and Director of Public Engagement at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She has organized programs in film and performance at ICA, Barnes Foundation, Asian Arts Initiative, Painted Bride Art Center, Scribe Video Center, International House, and Swarthmore College. Other projects include KinoWatt (2011-2012, co-curated with Sara Zia Ebrahimi) and Black Lily Film & Music Festival for Women (2006-2010). Maori is guest programmer for Scribe Video Center's spring 2017 season. Her film and video works have screened internationally and throughout the US, including her feature documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop (2006). She was a fellow at the 60th Flaherty Film Seminar and is a 2016 Ford Foundation Rockwood JustFilms Fellow. Maori received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University.

Charlotte Ickes is an art historian, curator, and current Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Charlotte has held fellowship appointments at the Whitney Independent Study Program, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia. She has curated exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Slought (Philadelphia, PA, co-curated with Iggy Cortez), and ICA (Philadelphia, PA), and organized public programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), Slought, and ICA. Her scholarship has appeared in American Art and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Charlotte received her BA from Yale University and PhD in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania.

SEASON 15

Ruth Somalo is a Spanish filmmaker, programmer and researcher based in New York. She works as a programmer for DocumentaMadrid, DOC NYC film festival and is the co-programmer of the symposium The Limit of Our Gaze: Women Filmmakers and Contemporary Documentary in Spain at KJCC. Her nonfiction work touches upon issues such as labor rights, chronic illness, death rituals, ghosts, creative processes, tears and musical theatre; and has been shown theatrically in Spain and in festivals and museums nationally and abroad including the Contemporary Art Center Matadero de Madrid, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Cinema du Réel, ADFF, L’Alternativa, Documentamadrid, MOMA PS1 (Expo1) and at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam (Spanish Cinema Without Fear). Ruth is currently a PhD. candidate at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid finishing her dissertation and a member of the research group Hist-Ex at the Spanish National Research Council working at the crossroads of narrative medicine and documentary.

SEASON 14

Chris Stults has been the Associate Curator of Film/Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts since 2002. His recent touring series Cruzamentos: Contemporary Brazilian Documentary was the largest such survey ever presented in North America. His writings on film have appeared in numerous publications, including Cinema Scope, Film Comment, and the catalogue for the Vienna International Film Festival, among others. Stults has also taught the history of experimental filmmaking at The Ohio State University.

Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor in the Culture and Media department at Eugene Lang College, the New School. Her writing has appeared in October,Grey Room,and Social Text, and she is a regular contributor to Film Comment, Art-Agenda, and Film Quarterly. She is currently completing a book on gender and film materiality.

SEASON 13

Lana Lin is an artist/filmmaker/writer. Her films and videos have addressed the politics of cultural translation, and her collaborative multi-disciplinary projects (as Lin + Lam) have examined the construction of history. Lin's work has been shown in international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Her manuscript on the psychic effects of cancer, Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School. 

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Though operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth century experimental film. Smith makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Smith earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. She currently lives in Chicago while teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Art low-residency MFA program.

SEASON 12

Sukhdev Sandhu is an Associate Professor at New York University. His books include Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (winner of 2008 DH Lawrence International Prize For Travel Writing). He makes radio documentaries for the BBC, runs the Texte und Tone publishing imprint, and has written for the London Review of Books, Suddeutsche Zeitung, The Wire, Sight and Sound, New York, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.

SEASON 11

Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist. Town Hall, her directorial debut (co-directed with Jamila Wignot) broadcast nationally on PBS in 2014. She is the producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, and the archival producer of Matt Wolf’s Teenage. She is currently producing The Reagan Years, directed by Pacho Velez and directing a short documentary in Afghanistan, Hall of the Evening Star.

Pacho Velezis a filmmaker and teacher. His current project,  The Reagan Years, explores a popular actor's defining role: Leader of the Free World. Told entirely through a largely-unseen trove of archival footage, the film captures the pageantry, pathos, and charisma that followed the 40th President from Hollywood to the nation's capital. His last film, Manakamana(co-directed with Stephanie Spray) won a Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. It played around the world, including at the Whitney Biennial and the Toronto International Film Festival.  His earlier film and theater work have been presented at venues such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and on Japanese National Television. In 2010, Pacho completed his MFA at CalArts. He now lives in New York City.

SEASON 10

David Dinnell is a filmmaker and programmer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has programmed for the Ann Arbor Film Festival since 2006, becoming Program Director in 2010. Previously he was the Film Programmer for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Theatre for five seasons and was Program Director of the Media City Film Festival (Windsor, Canada) for its 11th and 12th editions. He has curated special programs for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cal Arts, the Wisconsin Film Festival, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Etiuda & Anima Film Festival in Krakow, among other venues. He was awarded a Fellowship for the 55th Flaherty Film Seminar in 2009.  His moving image work has been exhibited at various international venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, EXiS (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul), Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Images Festival and the Views from the Avant Garde.

Ted Kennedy is a filmmaker and programmer. Originally from Michigan, he is now based in New York and is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College. His video and installation work has been exhibited at Heliopolis (Brooklyn), Media City Film Festival (Windsor, Canada), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn), Flex: The Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, the Portland Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival (Chicago), Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, and the Art of the Real film series at Lincoln Center among other venues. In 2011, he co-founded the Studies and Observation Film Series, presenting creative non-fiction and experimental films in Ann Arbor. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Union Docs and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

SEASON 9

Jason Fox is a filmmaker, teacher, and graduate student based in New York City.  He is currently finishing his first feature-length project, PALTIK FAMILIES, an observational documentary that highlights many of the lingering legacies of the Philippine - American War in the Philippines. He has taught at Vassar College and at CUNY Hunter College, where he is completing a MFA in the Integrated Media Arts Program.  He also serves on the Board of Organization for Visual Progression, an organization that partners with social justice organizations to provide training on using visual media in their advocacy efforts.

SEASON 8

Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce STATE OF EMERGENCY, an interventionist video project, in collaboration with more than 15 artists. They began working together in the mid-seventies with a performance about the Weather Underground and then made the two-screen situationist Super-8 Disaster (1976), recently restored on DVD. They produced two 16 mm anti-documentaries on the politics of crime, and then a series of satiric semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the authoritarian structures indispensable to capital. Millner’s multimedia installations have explored domestic space as a battleground, first with the theory and practice of camouflage as the controlling aesthetic and then re-creating the designs and plans in U.S. army manuals on how to boobytrap the home. Larsen is also a novelist (Not a Through Street) and a media critic. Their conceptual video, 41 Shots, based on the police murder of immigrant street peddler, Amadou Diallo, examines the implicitly racist ‘broken windows’ theory of criminology. Their new video essay Rock the Cradle explores the fierce challenge posed by the Greek uprising of December '08-January '09 to the rule of global capital and the state, while relocating resonant aspects of the anarchist pasts of Barcelona and the Paris Commune within present-day struggles. Millner is also a professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.

SEASON 7

Jeronimo Rodriguez is a writer and critic and has worked as the host of the film review and interview program Toma 1 on NY1 Noticias in New York City for eight years, championing contemporary and foreign film. He collaborated on the script for the feature film Huacho, which was selected at Cannes 2009 Critics' Week (Semaine de la Critique) and the Toronto International Film Festival, and won several awards, including the Sundance Film Festival/NHK International Filmmakers Award. He also edited the feature Sentados frente al fuego(By the Fire), which premiered last year as an official selection of the San Sebastian Film Festival. He has contributed as a film critic for various publications, including BBC Worldwide, People Magazine in Spanish, Sports Illustrated Latino, and on his web site El Nuevo Canon (elnuevocanon.com), and most recently, he curated a documentary film series for Tropical Tuesdays organized by Cinema Tropical. He has also produced and directed short films, some with support of the screenwriting grant from FONDART (the Chilean Government's National Fund for the Arts).

SEASON 6

Jon Dieringer is the publisher and editor of New York City repertory film and media listings resource Screen Slate. His varied professional experiences include art direction and accounting for film and working as an assistant to independent film producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey and artist Neil Goldberg. Dieringer's video work has shown at various venues in New York City, and he has additionally authored projects supporting non-profit, activist and cultural organizations including Literacy for Incarcerated Teens and Occupy Cinema. He is presently one of the head programmers at Spectacle, a Brooklyn screening space established and maintained entirely by volunteers, and a board member of the New York Film/Video Council. Dieringer is The Flaherty's proud former communications coordinator.

SEASON 5

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist from New York. She produces videos, sculptures and installations around issues of gender and technology, pursues queer and feminist inquiries into areas of bio-science,science fiction, and animal studies. Her works have been shown in festivals, galleries and museums nationally and abroad, including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), the Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Videotage Art Space and Para-Site Gallery (Hong Kong), Festival Transitio_MX (Mexico), among others. She has received awards for her works including grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  High isAssociate Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, a department specializing in integrated electronic arts practices. Website: Kathy High

Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. His recent videos include an ongoing project titled "Seed Sold Back to the Farmer", a two-part animated essay about Taylorism and its psychic impact, and a re-edited segment of Caspar Stracke's "Circle's Short Circuit" (featuring an interview with Avital Ronell). His essays on film, video, and visual culture have appeared in Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Cineaste, and The Brooklyn Rail, along with exhibition catalogs and with DVD releases. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a NYFA Grant for Nonfiction Literature. He is also a member of Synthhumpers, an audio-visual collaboration with Josh Solondz. Jim currently teaches at City College. Website:Jim Supanick 

SEASON 4

Miriam Baleis New York-based critic and film programmer. Before working in film she worked in the music industry in London and as a museum arts educator in San Francisco. Her first film program was organized at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she's gone on to program series at Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Maysles Film Institute, 92Y, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and other venues. Her past programs, including "A Woman is a Woman: The Female POV" and "The Late Film," have been called "influential" and "radical" by critics Richard Brody and A.O. Scott, respectively. She has also appeared on panels and lectured widely in New York. Her criticism appears regularly in Film Comment, The L, Slantand Bombmagazines, and she is the editor of Joan's Digest: A Film Quarterly, an online feminist film journal that will be launched this autumn.  (photo by Nathan Perkel)

SEASON 3

Penny Lane is an independent filmmaker and occasional professor, programmer and writer.  Her work has screened at AFI FEST, Rotterdam, Images, MOMA, Oberhausen, Citizen Jane and lots of other places.  She's received awards and grants from Cinereach, Jerome Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, NYSCA, ETC, IFP, the LEF Foundation and more, but is perhaps most proud of the "Most Badass!" award she won at Iowa City Documentary Festival in 2009.  She's taught video and new media at Williams College, Bard College and Hampshire College. Currently, she's hard at work on her first three feature documentaries.  And yes, Penny Lane is her real name!