Caitlin Fisher
Caitlin Fisher
BA (Toronto), MA (Carleton), PhD (York)
Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture
Associate Professor, Department of Film, York University
Caitlin Fisher is a theorist, creative writer and web artist with broad interdisciplinary interests. Her research and teaching focus on the social and cultural aspects of communication technologies, hypermedia fiction, feminist theory and augmented reality. She completed York’s first hypertextual dissertation in 2000 and her hypermedia novella, These Waves of Girls, an exploration of memory, girlhood, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality, won the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2001 Award for Fiction. In 2008, she won the International Digital Literature Award Ciutat de Vinaròs Prize in Poetry for her augmented reality journey poem, Andromeda.
Dr. Fisher was awarded a prestigious Canada Research Chair in digital culture in 2004. She directs the Augmented Reality Lab in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York, where she is working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments that combine the physical world with digital traces and artifacts. She is also co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab.
Professor Fisher has taught at York University’s School of Women’s Studies at York and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Carleton University. She received a University-Wide Teaching Award at York in 1999.
John Greyson
John Greyson
Associate Professor: Production
Department of Film, York University
The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world.
Feature films include: Urinal (1988 – Best Feature Teddy, Berlin Film Festival); Zero Patience (1993 – Best Canadian Film, Sudbury Film Festival); Lilies (1996 – Best Film Genie, Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, San Francisco); Uncut (1997, Honourable Mention, Berlin Film Festival); The Law of Enclosures (2000, Best Actor Genie); Proteus, co-created with Jack Lewis (2003); and Fig Trees (2008 – Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Berlin Film Festival). Film/video shorts include: The Kipling Trilogy (1984-5), The ADS Epidemic (1987), The Making of Monsters (1991 – Best Canadian Short, Toronto Film Festival; Best Short Film Teddy – Berlin Film Festival), Herr (1998) and Packin’ (2001).
As a director for television, his credits include episodes for such series as Queer as Folk, Made In Canada (Best Director Gemini, 2002), Drop the Beat and Welcome to Paradox.
Professor Greyson’s publications include Urinal and Other Stories (Power Plant/Art Metropole) and co-editor of Queer Looks, a critical anthology of gay/lesbian media theory (Routledge). He is a co-investigator on York’s Future Cinema Lab, a joint research project with Film Professors Janine Marchessault and Caitlin Fisher. Supported by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Future Cinema Lab is a state-of-the-art media research facility into new digital storytelling techniques and how these can critically transform a diverse array of state-of-the-art screens.
John Greyson is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects, including The Olive Project, Deep Dish TV, Blah Blah Blah and AIDS Action Now. His contributions as a member and through service on the boards of arts organizations include V/Tape Distribution, Inside Out Film/Video Festival, the Euclid Theatre, Trinity Square Video, Charles St. Video, LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers Toronto) and Beaver Hall Artists Housing Co-op.
Professor Greyson has taught film and video theory and production in Canada, the United States, Cuba and South Africa. He joined the full-time faculty in York’s Film Department in 2005.
Mark David Hosale
Mark David Hosale
BA – music composition (College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara)
MM – music composition and theory (U Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
PhD – media arts and technology (UC Santa Barbara)
Assistant Professor: Digital Media
Digital Media Program, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University
mdhosale@yorku.ca
A media artist and composer, Professor Mark-David Hosale’s works have been exhibited and performed internationally at conferences, universities and festivals. He has given lectures and taught internationally at institutions in Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Canada and the US.
The connecting tissue of Professor Hosale’s interdisciplinary work lies in his exploration of nonlinear narrative as a representation of information, time and space. Nonlinear narrative is an inherent aspect of new media that provides a common baseline whereby media artworks can be evaluated and understood. Dr. Hosale’s primary research is an exploration of the question: “What is the form of nonlinear interactive narrative?”, providing the impetus for theoretical discussion and a formal approach to the understanding his works, while providing a basis for the creation of new works that have a dynamic nonlinear structure and reflect on our modern understanding of knowledge and nature.
In addition to non-linear narrative, Professor Hosale’s research and work explores the boundaries between the virtual and the physical world. Whether as part of an installation or performance work, the virtual spaces he creates are technologically transparent, sophisticated and virtuosic, as well as intuitive to experience and use.
Dr. Hosale joined York University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2011.
Ali Kazimi
Ali Kazimi
B.Sc.(St. Stephen’s, Delhi), B.F.A. (Honours) (York)
Assistant Professor: Production
Department of Film, York University
akazimi@yorku.ca
Ali Kazimi is a documentary filmmaker whose research interests include race, migration, indigineity, history and memory, with a particular interest in South Asia and Canada. He also has a keen interest in emerging and cutting-edge digital image technologies.
Professor Kazimi’s productions have been shown at festivals around the world, winning more than 30 national and international awards and a host of nominations. Highlights include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Gold Award, Woldfest, Houston; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Golden Sheaf, Yorkton Short Film Festival; and audience awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival.
He has been honoured with retrospectives at the 1998 IMAGES Festival of Independent Film & Video (Toronto), Pacific Film Archives/Berkeley Art Museum (2006), Mumbai International Film Festival (2008) and ViBGYOR International Documentary Film Festival in Thrissur, India, in 2009. On the small screen, his productions have been broadcast nationally (CBC, TVO, Vision TV, CBC- Newsworld, Knowledge Network and SCN) and internationally (Channel 4/UK, PBS/USA). His directing credits include over two dozen episodes of television documentary series.
In addition to shooting his own films, Ali Kazimi has also served as cinematographer for productions such as the Genie Award-winning A Song for Tibet (1992), My Niagara (1993), Bollywood Bound (2001) and The Journey of Lesra Martin (2002).
Alongside his creative roles, Professor Kazimi has guest-lectured internationally and been invited to serve on numerous national and international film juries. He has served as president of the Independent Film and Video Alliance and co-Chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus – Toronto, and is a member of the Director’s Guild of Canada.
Professor Kazimi joined the full-time faculty in York’s Film Department in 2006. He is currently working on film that re-examines the 1947 partition of British India.
Selected Filmography
Rex vs. Singh (2008) (co-director)
Runaway Grooms (2005)
Continuous Journey (2004)
Documenting Dissent (2001)
Some Kind of Arrangement (1998)
Passage From India (1998)
Shooting Indians (1997)
Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994)
Voice of our Own (1989) (co-director)
Brenda Longfellow
Brenda Longfellow
BA, MA (Carleton), PhD (York)
Associate Professor: Film Studies & Production
Department of Film, York University
brendal@yorku.ca
Brenda Longfellow is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and film theorist. Her productions include Our Marilyn (1987), an experimental documentary on Canadian swimmer Marilyn Bell; the feature-length drama Gerda (1992), on the life and times of Gerda Munsinger; A Balkan Journey/Fragments From The Other Side of War (1996); the Genie Award-winning documentary Shadow Maker: Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998); and Tina in Mexico (2002), a feature documentary on the silent film star and avant-garde photographer Tina Modotti, which won Best Arts Program at the Yorkton Film Festival, Bronze at the Columbus Film Festival, and a Golden Rose at the Montreux Television Festival.
Professor Longfellow’s most recent production, Weather Report (2008), is a feature-length television documentary that explores the effects of climate change on communities around the world. She is currently working on a series of musical shorts exploring the complex weave of delusion, dream and willful complicity that informs the evolution of the Tar Sands in Northern Alberta.
Dr. Longfellow has published numerous articles on feminist film theory and Canadian cinema in CineTracts, Screen, CineAction and the Journal of Canadian Film Studies. She is a co-editor of the recent anthology Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers.
Janine Marchessault
Janine Marchessault
Professor, Department of Film, York University in Toronto, Canada
Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University
Janine Marchessault holds a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization and is the Co-Director of the Visible City Project + Archive which is examining new practices of media art in a variety of urban contexts. She is also a co-investigator on the CFI funded Future Cinema Lab, a state of the art digital media research facility devoted to ‘new stories for new screens.’ She is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005), and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); as well as Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000), and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999). Dr. Marchessault is a founding editor of the arts journal Public: Art/Ideas/Culture and a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada.
She is currently researching the cultural and political practices of artists in urban contexts and new forms of translocal citizenship in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. She has two book projects in progress: Ecstatic Worlds: 20th Century Utopian Film Projects which is examining collective experiments with film and media that have been driven by aspirations for universality. She is co-editing Urban Mediations: Art, Ethnography and Material Culture—an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies.
Basic Fields of Interest:
- Classical and contemporary film theory
- Old and new media studies
- Urban studies; theories of identity
- Film/emotion/cognition
Current Research Projects:
- Three cities (Toronto, Havana, Helsinki): Notions of democracy and citizenship in the media arts
- The culture and ideologies of suburbs
- Toronto School of Communication 1950s (theories of technology and modernity)
Personal website
Visible City Project + Archive
LOT: Experiments in Urban Research
Don Sinclair
Don Sinclair
BA (Mathematics), BA (Computer Science and Music) – York, MA (Interdisciplinary Studies) - York Associate Professor: New Media
Fine Arts Cultural Studies Program, York University
dws@yorku.ca
Don Sinclair’s interests and creative research encompass physical computing, wearable computing, interactive sound art, laptop performance, web art, database art, interactive dance, video projection, cycling art, sustainability, green architecture and choral singing.
His web/data art work Variations/Variantes, included in a retrospective of net.art in Canada since 2000 by the Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (no 32 / 2008), is part of a series of works based on oh, those everyday spaces, a database of over 25,000 images captured during a 15 month period while cycling in and around Toronto. Work from this series has been exhibited at the Images Festival (Toronto), T-minus Festival of Time-Lapse Video (New York), no-org.net (Jerusalem), SINTESI : Festival Delle Arti Elettroniche (Napoli), RestCycling Art Festival (Berlin) and Toronto Bike Week Bike Art Showcase.
Professor Sinclair has worked with several local choreographers and dancers to create works that explore movement-based manipulation of sound and image. His collaborators include Holly Small (a journey toward the end in the shape of air, Draw a Bicycle, Night Vision – Nyx), Susan Lee, Yves Candau/Nur Intan Murtdaza and Karen Kaeja/Diana Groenendijk (Stable Dances at Nuit Blanche 2008).
The exploration of the sonic world is important to many of his works, and he has collaborated with numerous sound-based artists to create audience-focused interfaces. They include Andra McCartney (Journées Sonores, Canal de Lachine, interaction / rétroaction / feedback, Toronto-Norwood-Toronto); Chantal Dumas/Christian Calon (around radio roadmovies); and Darren Copeland/New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto Island Sound Map, Mississauga Sound Map). Current projects include the development of several physical computing-based works. The Cyclist Comfort Visualizer is a wearable computing piece designed to be worn by a cyclist in traffic. Making Conspicuous Consumption is a set of works that display aspects of a building’s energy consumption. He is also part of a SSHRC-funded team holding a research creation grant, engaged in a project titled Reflections of the Unimaginable; a Multimedia Rendering of Three Cities Hosting the Holocaust.
Professor Sinclair has taught new media in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York since 1990. He was the primary designer of the Faculty’s new media courses and was instrumental in the development of the inter-Faculty Specialized Honours BA Program in Digital Media in conjunction with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Communication Studies. An enthusiastic participant in collaborative teaching, he has developed innovative cross/interdisciplinary courses in interactive dance with Holly Small(Dance) and physical computing with Wojtek Janczak (Design), as well as working on technology-enhanced learning initiatives with Renate Wickens.
Professor Sinclair currently serves as Coordinator of the Fine Arts Cultural Studies Program.
Website and project links:
Research creation website
oh, those everyday spaces
Three by Three
Toronto-Norwood-Toronto
