The Project Team consists of faculty members, postdoctoral and graduate students drawn from a variety of disciplines in the fine arts, social sciences, and humanities. A full-time administrative assistant oversees the project, and technical assistance is provided by support staff from the Department of Film at York University.
Janine Marchessault, Director
Janine Marchessault holds a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization and is the Co-Director of the Visible City Project + Archive. She teaches courses in the area of Cinema and Media Studies through the Graduate Program in Film, and is cross appointed to several graduate programs at York including Communication and Culture, Social and Political Thought, and Sociology.
Her most recent publications include Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (with Susan Lord, University of Toronto Press, 2007), Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005), Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (with Kim Sawchuk, Routledge, 2000), and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (with Kay Armatage, Kass Banning and Brenda Longfellow, University of Toronto Press, 1999). She is currently researching the cultural and political practices of artists in urban contexts and new forms of translocal citizenship in Havana and Helsinki. Her forthcoming book Ecstatic Worlds explores the affective dimensions of non-fiction film.
Susan Lord, Co-Investigator
CV Website
Susan Lord is Associate Professor in Film Studies and holds cross-appointments with the Departments of Art and Women’s Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She serves as an Adjunct Professor for Carleton University’s SSAC/Film program. Her main teaching and research areas are feminist theory and film culture, cultural studies of media and technology, and Cuban film and visual culture. She has published on gender and technology, as well as on feminist film culture in several recent anthologies. She edited a special section of West Coast Line on “Global Screens,” and co-edited two collections of essays: with Janine Marchessault, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); and with Annette Burfoot, Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006). She is midway through a manuscript on the Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. She is a member of the Public Access Collective and has edited several issues of Public, including the recent "Digipopo: Digital Poetics and Politics."
Michael Darroch, Co-Investigator
Michael Darroch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Windsor, and a Co-Investigator on the Visible City Project + Archive (www.visiblecity.ca). He received his PhD from McGill University’s Department of Art History & Communication Studies. He holds an MA in German Studies from Université de Montréal, and has also attended graduate studies at Universität Konstanz and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Recent publications include "Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group 1951-1957" (Canadian Journal of Communication 2008), "Digital Multivocality and Embodied Language in Theatrical Space" (Intermédialités 12, 2008) and "'The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi': Staging Polyphony in Montréal and Toronto" in Urban Enigmas: Montréal, Toronto and the Problem of Comparing Cities (McGill-Queen’s 2007). He has also translated for several production companies and playwrights.
Sharon Hayashi, Co-Investigator
BA (Brown), MA, PhD (Chicago)
Assistant Professor: Film Studies
Department of Film, York University
Professor Hayashi specializes in Japanese cinema and media studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual culture and history. Current research projects includes a study of Japanese cinema and empire, a critical history of Japanese Pink Cinema, and a web-based archival documentary about the uses of new media by new social movements. She has worked in documentary film and TV production and as a programmer and translator for Japanese and Asian film festivals.
Dr. Hayashi's teaching and research areas include: film history, historiography and criticism; critical theory, gender and media; colonial and diasporic cinemas; travelling and regional cinemas, postcolonial film; transnationalism; globalization; and East Asian film and video.
Selected publications include: "Negotiating Mobile Subjectivities: Costume Play, Landscape and Belonging in the Colonial Road Movies of Shimizu Hiroshi", Film,History and Cultural Citizenship, ed. Tina Chen, Routledge (forthcoming); "Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan”, with Anne Mcknight. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol.13 no.1, Spring 2005; and "Women on the Run: Travel and Utopia in the Films of Shimizu Hiroshi", Hong Kong International Film Festival Catalogue, April 2004.
Tess Takahashi, Co-Investigator
BA (Brown), MA (NYU), PhD (Brown)
Assistant Professor: Film Studies
Department of Film, York University
Professor Takahashi specializes in experimental media and technology. Her research focuses on the historical and discursive construction of technologies of the image including photography, celluloid film, television, video, animation, and digital media.
Dr. Takahashi's teaching and research interests include: theories of technology, theories of the subject, community and collectivism, transnationalism, postcolonial theory, globalization, international avant-garde cinemas, third cinema, and experimental documentary. She is currently working on a book based on her prize-winning dissertation, Impure Film: Medium Specificity and the North American Avant-Garde (1965-2005).
Selected publications include: "The Imaginary Archive," Camera Obscura; "Writing the World: Medium Specificity and Avant-Garde Film in the Digital Age," Visible Language; "'Meticulously, Recklessly Worked-Upon': Materiality in Contemporary Experimental Animation," The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema; and “Conversations with Julia Meltzer and David Thorne on Experimental Documentary;” Millennium Film Journal.
Research Associates
