People Directory

Gary Kibbins

Acting Department Head

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for Queen's Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at Queen’s University. Until 2000 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A book of essays and scripts was published in 2005: Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins, ed. A. J. Paterson, YYZ Books, Toronto; 2005; 254 pp.  

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Glenn Gear's practice is grounded in a research creation methodology shaped by Inuit and Indigenous ways of knowing – often employing the use of animation, photo archives, painting, beading, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin. He has worked on projects with the National Film Board of Canada, collaborated with other artists, and created installations, online works, and live video/audio projections that explore the complex relationships between land, animals, history, and archives. 

 

A growing area within his larger artistic practice is the sharing of his animation knowledge of low-budget and experimental techniques through mentoring opportunities and workshops, often in collaboration with Indigenous youth and first-time filmmakers.

 

 

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Heather is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program. Her research focuses on found footage horror films, including the cultural history of the genre and themes of surveillance within it. She is also interested in adaptation theory, screenlife horror films, and the interplay between reality and image.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Helga Smallwood is the Graduate Assistant for the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies MA and PhD programs. Helga previously worked with undergraduate students in the Department of Film and Media, in the role of Interim Undergraduate Assistant, and in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, in the role of Interim Student Experience Coordinator. Before coming to Canada in 2020, she worked as a Researcher Development Officer at the University of York (UK), and prior to that has over 10 year’s experience in research and academic administration. 

 

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Hilary Jay is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. Prior to this, she completed her B.A. in Philosophy and Art History at McGill and her M.A. in SCCS at Queen’s in 2022. Her research is engaged with the contemporary relevance of archives, time-based media, and curation. Hilary is also currently a Research Assistant in the Vulnerable Media Lab. 

Ian Robinson

Graduate Chair

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

I have an ongoing interest in Canadian film, both in terms of industry and culture. Some of my recent research considers the place of auteurs, co-productions, and festivals in Canadian film culture. Recent work includes “Toronto on Screen,” a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (Marchessault and Straw eds., 2018), and a forthcoming chapter on Xavier Dolan. Another strand of my research pertains to the emergence of event cinema and the intersections of film and performance in ‘live cinema.’ My research on event cinema is forthcoming in Sounds of Fury: Mapping the Rockumentary (Iverson and MacKenzie eds., 2020). I am also currently co-editing a volume on film, performance and intermediality, forthcoming in 2021. Finally, I have a longstanding interest in geographical approaches to film and media, especially concerning cinema and urbanism. My current book project brings together geography and film theory in order to investigate how contemporary filmmakers and artists have responded to the forces of globalization and localization. I am especially interested in supervising projects on aspects of Canadian film and television; theories and histories of intermediality, liveness, and performance; national cinemas; and projects about film and media geographies.

/filmandmedia/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff-bios/ian-robinson

Film and Media

I am working on cultures of urban mobility and community, particularly those that resist petrocultures and further equity. My collaborative documentary Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories is part of this research. Currently preparing a monograph about several global cities, I am particularly interested in how motion shapes how we continuously become in the world. My larger published works are Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary and the co-edited anthologies Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin and Christa Wolf A Companion. I also developed and run an etandem platform for language learning www.LinguaeLive.ca. I did my PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford. At Berkeley, the Weimar film specialist Anton Kaes and Frankfurt School and Habermas expert Robert Holub were my advisors. I typically approach narrative fiction and documentary by triangulating historicization/contextualization, theory, and attention to the language of the artistic text; I would be particularly amenable to working with students who find this approach productive.

  

http://www.queensu.ca/llcu/german/people/jennifer-hosek

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation. 

Jessica Turner is a PhD student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies. As a curator, her research broadly encompasses the intersection of art and climate. Climate communication, relational aesthetics, audience evaluation, and place-based research all inform her work. Jessica is currently a Research Assistant in the Art and Media Lab.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Jung-Ah Kim is an artist-curator, researcher, and PhD candidate whose work bridges media and textiles through conceptual and material experimentation and re-enactment. She uses weaving as an entry point to explore broader questions of technology, media, and culture. Her research engages with the history of computing, feminist media critique, and the politics of remembering and cultural amnesia embedded in diasporic objects such as a Korean carpet discovered in a Canadian museum. Through the reconstruction of an ancient loom, she examines the tacit knowledge produced through hands-on creation and the intersections of craft, technology, and cultural memory.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

I am an Associate Professor in the Film and Media department of Queen’s University and co-director (with F. Grandena, U of Ottawa) of the inter-university research group EPIC (EsthĂ©tique et politique de l’image cinĂ©matographique). My research interests are centered around Indigenous film and poetry, Quebec cinema, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema. I am  presently the lead researcher for one of the Archive Counter Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) on Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women. My latest publications include book chapters on the rock group U2 (Mackenzie and Iversen, 2021) and on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) as well as an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) an article on QuĂ©bĂ©cois cinema and AmericanitĂ© (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019) and a book chapter on Canadian and QuĂ©bĂ©cois Indigenous cinemas (Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema, 2019). In terms of supervision, I am interested in film history, film criticism, Indigenous, QuĂ©bĂ©cois and transnational cinemas, cinema and landscapes, as well as documentary filmmaking and road movies from around the world (especially women on the road).

 

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Kelly O’Dette is the new Film and Media Department Technician.  Kelly has worked as editor in film and television in Toronto for the past 10 years.  She has experience with various genres such as comedy and documentary.  She also worked as a post-production supervisor overseeing project workflow and delivery.  Kelly holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from Western University. 

Film and Media

Music, violence and trauma; music and nationhood; music and gender. Recent publications examine music and cultural trauma (Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Mortality, 2017), American popular music in the aftermath of 9/11 (Music and War in the United States, 2019), and Canadian combatants, music, and the remembrance of war (MUSICultures, (2019).

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Lindsay K. Muir is a Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies Ph.D. student within the Film and Media department at Queen’s University. She recently completed her M.A. in the same department with her thesis, Where the Willow Meets the Moon: Lessons in Settler Curation Through Indigenous Storytelling. Prior to graduate school, Lindsay earned a double major in Art History and English Literature with a minor in World Cinemas from McGill University. Her current research revolves around the representations of Celtic and Indigenous women in various media.

Most recently, Lynda’s research focus has expanded to the field of cultural diplomacy, with special consideration to the role of art exhibitions in advancing Canadian foreign policy and international relations. As Director of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI), she leads an international team in the process of building a vibrant research network that brings academics and practitioners in the cultural sector into conversation with practitioners and scholars of diplomacy.  With the support of a recent SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2019-2025), she led a series research summits focused on The Cultural Relations Approach to Diplomacy. The summits produced three reports: Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice (2021); Players: We Are All Practitioners (2023); and Policies as Discourse (2025).

Lynda is Vice Dean in the Faculty of Arts & Science (2021-), where she oversees Faculty Relations across the faculty’s 30 departments and interdisciplinary programs. Previously, she was Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science (2014-2021) and Director of Cultural Studies, Queen’s University’s interdisciplinary graduate program (2009-2014). 

After completing their Undergraduate degree at Queen’s University with a major in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Gender Studies, Maeva Baldassarra is pursuing their MA in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies program. Maeva’s research interests surround New Queer Cinema and those unique innovations integral to the movement’s facilitation of radical queer visibility and worldmaking.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Manal Osman is a 21-year-old MA student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies. Obtaining a Mass Media and Communications degree from the University of Balamand, she is an advocate of storytelling and cinema. Her education involves exploring textual media studies, writing prose, and creating moving image.   

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Current research interests include continuing work on electronic music composer David Tudor, which began in the early 1990s, and a project more recently begun in collaboration with Dr Laura J Cameron investigating the life and practice of early Canadian field recordist William WH Gunn. In both cases the research is expressed through both published papers and works of research-creation. I am also continually developing other streams of research: an alphabet of 26 electroacoustic compositions revisiting 26 other composers' sonorities is in progress, and I regularly create sound design/scores for theatre and film. Another of my pursuits is audio recording and production in diverse genres, and some albums made with Kingston musicians have received wide recognition including Polaris Prize and JUNO nominations.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Mehvish is pursuing research in the field of documentary filmmaking. Being a documentary filmmaker herself, with her films being showcased in different film festivals across the globe, she continues to question the methodology and ethics in her field. Her particular interest concerns with the representation of subjects in documentaries based in protracted political conflict zones, trying to envision them beyond the scope of victimhood. She questions the patterns of absences within such documentaries, such as that of humour and transcendentality. Her research is a combination of critique of existing documentary work in and about Kashmir as well as an exploration of alternative and experimental modes for responsible representation of documentary subjects. The cornerstone of this research is understanding, learning, and finding ways to represent documentary subjects of this long-term conflict zone without victimizing them. Currently her work is focusing on the impact of digital surveillance on communication channels at interpersonal and community levels – and the viability of old media technology in circumventing the issues.

Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts

Dr. MĂ©l Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast () and an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Âé¶čÍűŐŸ. Her areas of interest and scholarly expertise are: data infrastructure, big tech and the environment.