Our Students

Alex Williams is a filmmaker and theatre artist whose work responds to legacies of colonialism as well as through autobiographical and material explorations. Current research interests include decolonial and collaborative cinematic methodologies and aesthetics, histories of colonial policy, Indigenous/settler relations, colonial identity formation, Indigenous, queer and feminist theory, and participatory practices of curation and media exhibition. He is a York Elia Scholar whose CGS-supported doctoral research/creation dissertation is a collaborative nonfiction film project entitled The Trust Accounts, examining histories of Canadian economic policies towards Indigenous people. The project is a follow-up to his 2015 documentary the pass system, which exposed the segregationist practice of requiring First Nations people to request and carry passes when leaving reserve. The film screened widely across Canada, was broadcast on APTN and CBC, and was nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards. Alex has an BFA from Emily Carr University in Film/Video and did his MFA in Film Production at York. He has taught in the Department of Design at Sheridan College and at the National Theatre School of Canada. He was President of Charles Street Video for six years, is on the advisory board of Seneca College’s Documentary Film Institute and is a Programmer with Cinema Politica.

Becka Barker is an interdisciplinary artist and educator of settler ancestry who uses animation, collaboration, and process cinema as key strategies for research and studio practice. Her SSHRC-funded PhD project traces developments in experimental animation through community-based movements over the past quarter century. Becka’s work has been supported by agencies such as the National Film Board and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has presented at venues such as Ottawa International Animation Festival, EXiS Seoul (Winner, Best International Film, 2007), Society for Animation Studies and Universities Art Association of Canada. Becka comes to York’s PhD program in Cinema and Media Studies after 15 years as Regular Part-Time Faculty in Film and Expanded Media at NSCAD University and five years as Visiting Foreign Faculty in the Film/Animation Department and School for Global Education and Exchange at Soonchunhyang University (ROK). She holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from Mount Allison University, a BFA from NSCAD University, and an M. Ed. from University of Calgary.

Cléo Sallis-Parchet is a researcher, writer and community organizer. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation traces the history and development of the 1973 Toronto Women & Film International Festival as a lens into feminist media activism and women's networking history in Canada. A curator and writer, her work has appeared in BlackFlash, Found Footage Magazine, and Film Appreciation Academic Journal. She was the recipient of the Jeffrey and Sandra Lyons Canadian Film Scholarship in 2023 and the Gerald Pratley Award in 2026. Cléo holds an MA in Cinema & Media Studies from York University and an Honours BA in Art History & Film Studies from Concordia University.

David Han is a media artist, scholar and educator whose work employs emerging technology to explore the boundaries between computation, cinema and new media. His current doctoral work examines the unique affordances of virtual reality (VR). Building upon research in media studies and cognitive science and inspired by early formalist experimentation in filmmaking, his research creation project aims to contribute to an understanding of the defining characteristics of this new medium and expand the range of possibilities for creative practice in VR.

Dhvani is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. Her research and curatorial practice focus on experimental moving image, particularly attuned to queer, feminist, and speculative archival practices in contemporary exhibitions. Her curatorial interests also extend to sound art and multi-sensorial experiences more broadly. In 2021 she curated places where sounds turn to dreams…a multimedia group exhibition in Toronto that centred artists who engage with sonic ecologies and world-making in their practices, and in 2022, served as co-chair of the annual Communication and Culture graduate conference and art exhibition on the theme “The Politics of Sound,” co-hosted by York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. She is also a graduate research associate at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology.

Em Barton (she/they) began their PhD in Cinema and Media Arts in 2019. She holds an undergraduate in Philosophy and a MA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Their dissertation project is about the disparate archives of grassroots queer, feminist cinema scenes in Toronto beginning in the 1970's stretching into the early 2000's. Em is the co-chair of the Toronto Film and Media Seminar and happily co-organizes Archive / Counter-Archives Working Papers series.

Emily Collins has a BA in Comparative Literature and Culture from the University of Western Ontario and an MA in Arts and Culture from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. More recently, she completed an MA in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary Masters project examined the intersection of cinematic representations of space, place and landscape with gender and feminist film strategy within the films of Agnès Varda. Emily has worked across arts and culture institutions in local and international settings, including the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Festival Scope in Paris; VUCAVU in Toronto; and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her areas of interest include feminist film theory, sound studies, sound in film, women filmmakers, and film festivals. Her PhD dissertation is tentatively titled “Listening for Gender: Resistant Soundscapes in Contemporary Feminist Film."

Ester Bovard is a film writer, researcher and archivist based in Toronto. Currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies, her doctoral research explores the effects of digitalization on the negotiation of collective memory in El Salvador. A graduate of the MA programme in Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam, she has collaborated on audiovisual preservation projects with Arsenal Filminstitut, UMAM Documentation & Research, and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. Her research interests include counter archival praxis, data feminism, digital cultures in Latin America, and archival decolonization in the digital sphere.

Evan Tapper (he/him) holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He has received awards from organizations such as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council, and Volunteer Toronto. Evan was a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu Japan, and the Jewish Museum in New York. His animations, videos, performances and installations have been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, South America, the Middle East, Australia, and Asia. This work was featured at events such as World Pride and Nuit Blanche Toronto, festivals such as the Melbourne International Animation Festival, museums including the Tate Modern, galleries such as InterAccess, and broadcast on the CBC. Evan taught animation and media art courses at the University of Toronto Scarborough, OCAD University, McMaster University, and the State University of New York College at Fredonia. Evan was the Founding Director of the School of Continuing Studies at OCAD University and the Dean of Extended Studies at CalArts.

Fatma Ozen is a first-year PhD student in Cinema & Media Studies at York University. She holds a BA in English Literature from Hacettepe University, Turkey, and an MA in Cultural Studies from Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. She made her first documentary, Pieces of Canada, in 2023. Her research interests include transnational cinema, diaspora studies, digital media, gender & sexuality, feminist film theory, postcolonial theory, and Turkish cinema. Her PhD research focuses on Middle Eastern queer diasporic communities on streaming platforms.

Federica Foglia is a transnational visual artist, editor and writer. She is interested in issues of immigration, displacement, assimilation, post-humanism and finding a visual language to represent these experiences. She holds a BA in Multimedia Languages and Computer Skills for humanities: History of Art, Theatre, and Cinema from the University of Naples L'Orientale and is currently attending York University to complete an MFA in Film. Her short films Exit/Entrance (2015) and Fantassút (2016) have screened and won awards at film festivals around the world, including Camerimage, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Reykjavik International Film Festival and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Her latest short Mix, Wildflower Seeds (2017) had its world premiere at the Anthology Film Archives - New York. She recently received the RBC Arts Access Fund Award for newcomer artists in Canada and was awarded the Premio Mediterraneo in Italy.

Galit Ariel is a TechnoFuturist, author and creative that gained a BA in Product Design from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, an MA in Design Management & Innovation from Savannah College of Art & Design, and currently pursuing her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies focusing on Human-Computer interaction and Worldmaking with the use of emerging technologies. Galit explores the wild and imaginative side of immersive technologies and their impact on our cultures, behaviours and interactions. Galit is the founder of Future Memory Inc. futurememoryinc.com—a speculative design agency, a published author of ‘Augmenting Alice—The Future of Identity, Experience and Reality’ www.augmentingalice.com; a sought-after speaker featured at global conferences such as TED, The Next Web, SXSW, Fifteen Seconds, Slush Tokyo, FITC, The European Union, Bell Labs, and many more. She is also an RSA (Royal Society of Arts) fellow and several think tanks such as THE150 (that created the Copenhagen Catalog—150 principles for a new direction in tech).

Haoran Chang is a multimedia artist focusing on the liminal relationship between the virtual and reality. He received his BS from the University of Wisconsin Madison, MFA in Fine Art from Maryland Institute College of Art, and MFA in digital media from the University of California Santa Cruz. He has exhibited works in various locations virtually and physically, including the CICA museum in South Korea, Walter Otero Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and many more. He published papers in peer-reviewed journals like Refract and Virtual Creativity. He is also the founder of the Mixed Reality collective Chameleon Gallery.

Jessie Krahn is a York Elia Scholar, a first-year PhD student in cinema studies, and a writer. For her dissertation, she is researching notions of authorship on social media, especially the ways interactions between authors and audiences arise in the formal components of internet video. Jessie’s interests have led her to study horror cinema as well, with her forthcoming article in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, “‘Breathe in for your Vitality’: The Breath as the Nexus of Meaning in Ari Aster’s Midsommar” exploring the relationship between cinematic audiences and breathing bodies on-screen.

Born in the Netherlands and raised in Germany, Julia Kathrin Lehmann has always had a keen interest in discovering the world; she is currently based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from Concordia University, where she received the honours of Concordia Scholar, the Marc Gervais Prize in Communication Studies, as well as the Vincent, Olga and Denis Nicolas-Diniacopoulos Scholarship.

She is a documentary filmmaker and experienced photographer who brings her photographic sensitivity to the moving image. She is interested in socially engaged documentary filmmaking and uses documentary filmmaking as a narrative and explorative tool for investigative storytelling. More specifically, she investigates why and how societal change is provoked and eventually actualized or denied. Under which circumstances is progress pursued and able to flourish? Currently, she is exploring the visual potentials of a feminist approach to drone cinematography together with the affectivity of telepresence.

Website: jklehmann.com

Kate Van de Ven's research explores Toronto’s many film festivals, their relationship to their urban communities and how different kinds of festival space impact understandings of Toronto as a particular kind of place: a festival city. Her broader interests include film cultures and curation; media literacy as a driver for social justice; and cinematic urbanism. She has published on spectacular representations of Paris and hotels and motels as cinematic purgatories as well as writing broadly for and about film festivals. She previously studied in the film departments at UCLA and Queen’s University.

Kyla Whetham (she/her) is a PhD student in York University's Cinema and Media Studies program. She is also an alumnus of the University of Ottawa Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy Program and the University of Toronto Cinema Studies Program. Her doctoral research will explore representations of motherhood in Canadian cinema. Outside academia, she regularly works in community and regional theatre, both on stage and behind the scenes.

Lexie Corbett holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University and a Master of Arts from York University. A lifelong cinephile, she is also co-curator of This is The Feminist Archive: Canadian Film and Video 1970s-90s, a multi-part screening series. Her PhD research looks at maternal subjectivity, and the implications of the mother/daughter relationship in American genre cinema.

Lia Tarachansky is a Soviet-born Israeli journalist and filmmaker. Her award-winning films range in style from investigative to experimental and focus on marginalized communities in Israel and Palestine, their struggles for justice, and the ongoing anti-colonial fight for peace. She has worked for the BBC, The Guardian, TeleSUR, and The Real News and her work can be seen on Naretiv Productions (www.naretivproductions.com). In her PhD Tarachansky will be expanding on her documentary film work by examining the Colonial Gaze in cinema and in new media. She will be researching how indigenous communities in Canada/Turtle Island and in Israel/Palestine make visible spaces that are rendered invisible by colonialism. Alongside groups challenging invisibility of indigenous spaces, she will be co-creating Augmented Reality projects to ‘return’ villages, homes, and other sites, examining the impact of making virtually visible what is physically destroyed and whether that ‘return’ can challenge colonial collective denial.

Luke Kuplowsky’s work is interested in cinema’s radical potential for challenging the way we perceive the world. He is currently a York Elia Scholar whose SSHRC funded project explores imaginings and philosophies of community in contemporary documentary and fiction film and media, attending to their capacity to give rise to creative forms of attention, care and responsibility. Luke is also a practicing musician currently working on a series of albums that interpret and respond to the poetry of Ryōkan Taigu and Bohdan Ihor Antonych (among others).

Marko Djurdjić currently has three degrees: a BA from McGill University, a BEd from OISE, and a MA from York University. He is currently working on his fourth. His research interests include media, education & pedagogy; teachers on film; social media and pop culture; "middle-brow" entertainment; punk and hip-hop in cinema; architecture in film; and the contemporary media and entertainment landscape during COVID-19. He has worked for festivals, private corporations, non-profits, cities, and schools. He's presented papers all over, and his next presentation (tentatively) will be at SCMS 2021, where he'll be reading a paper on screening practices, space-building, and self-regulatory behaviours involving elementary-aged day-camp campers. He just started another band (likely), and he's working on another paper (even more likely).

Mary Arnatt holds an MA and a BA (hons.) in Film, Communications, and Media Studies from the University of Calgary. Her research centers on feminist production and industry studies, women in film, Canadian media cultures, and horror/cult cinema. Mary received the 2018 Gerald Pratley Award from The Film Studies Association of Canada for her presentation “’The Set is (Still) Closed!’ Exploring Canadian Production Culture at Cinepix,” and is a recipient of the Graduate Fellowship for Academic Distinction from York University. Mary has served on the executive board for the Calgary Cinematheque, and has worked with Canada Learning Code, LUMA Quarterly, Movies that Matter (now Cinema Politica), and The Calgary Horror Convention.

Mary Hegedus is a PhD Candidate whose research is based on ecocinema criticism and the intersections of fungi and film, multispecies co-habitation, post-nature studies and ecological filmmaking practices in our era of climate uncertainty. Mary holds a BA with honours in Anthropology and Cinema Studies and an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She co-edited the collection, Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis (Vernon Press 2026).

Michaela Pňačeková is an international XR artist, producer, a PhD student and ELIA scholar at York University. Her focus lies in the ways new media impact the real through interaction with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence. Her first VR piece Symphony of Noise VR was exhibited at VRHam!, Reeperbahn Music Festival, IDFA Doc Lab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction in Amsterdam 2019, LEV Madrid 2020, Geneva International Film Festival 2020. According to the Forbes Magazine, it was listed as one of the best XR installations of 2019. She has co-created an interactive predictive policing app Pre-Crime Calculator and produced three feature length documentaries (Border Cut, Waterproof, Scars) and two short fiction films. She is the German executive co-producer, of another mixed reality co-production Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2020. Member of the board of directors of Femme Futures Grant at Kaleidoscope, European Women's Association and Documentary Association of Europe.

Mustafa Uzuner is a filmmaker, curator, producer, and distributor. He holds a Masters degree in Film Studies from Concordia University. From 2011 to 2018, Mustafa served as the head of programming for the !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival. Subsequently, he ventured into distribution and audience design, highlighting contemporary art cinema by acclaimed directors such as Pedro Costa, Hong Sangsoo, Alain Gomis, Bi Gan, and Payal Kapadia.

Saffron Maeve Frodyma is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. She holds an MA and BA from the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and her present research examines ritual and procedure in visual art documentaries. She is also a Graduate Associate at Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and the Centre for Feminist Research. Beyond the academy, Saffron is a critic, film curator, and arts worker who has written for Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, The Globe and Mail, and Documentary Magazine, and programmed for TIFF, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Paradise Theatre, Revue Cinema, The Cinematheque (BC), Hot Docs, and more.

Sana Akram is an interdisciplinary media artist, spatial designer, and researcher working at the intersection of immersive storytelling and performance, decolonial worldbuilding, and community engagement. Her doctoral research-creation reconceptualizes extended reality, worlding, and technology, in and by way of the Indo-Islamicate Tilismi Dastan storytelling and performance tradition. Approaching media technologies as relationally situated to each of her works has allowed her to build towards a critically informed creative practice spanning interactive/new media documentary, essay film, photography, virtual environment design, and immersive mixed reality. She has showcased at several international festivals and exhibitions and published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Her broader research interests lie in cocreation and research-creation; Islamic art, literature, mysticism, and the occult sciences; space and place; the urban imaginary and civic engagement.

Sana is a formally trained architect-urbanist and a Fulbright alum, and holds an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from the Parsons School of Design, The New School.

Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University, where she received the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award.

Sophia Hershfield earned her BA (hons.) in English and Philosophy from the University of Winnipeg, and an MA in English with a specialization in Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto. Their dissertation examines the intersection between affect and aesthetics in Hollywood cinema and rising fascism in America since 9/11. Sophia's research interests include the Frankfurt School, Marxist theory, and contemporary cinema.

Theo Xenophontos holds a BA from the University of Toronto, having majored in both Cinema Studies and English, while minoring in History, and a MA in Cinema and Media Studies from York University. He has presented his work at conferences in Ottawa, Montreal, Albuquerque, and elsewhere. His current research is focused on creating a community-based audiovisual archive with members of the Cypriot Canadian diaspora. Beyond archives, his other areas of interest include film history, media archaeology, and experimental film & video.

Tim Nicodemo received his MA in Film Studies from the University of Western Ontario in 2013. For his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies Tim seeks to build upon his passion for exploring novel methods of phenomenological research by examining artificial intelligence filmmaking and the particular ways its formal and theoretical properties complicate experiences of Reality and the Real for spectators and filmmakers alike. Other research interests of Tim’s include ecocriticism, future cinemas, film technologies, exploitation cinema, film pedagogy, genre deconstruction, experimental film, and film movements.