Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema – Faculty Research Fields
Overview
This report profiles full‑time faculty at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, focusing on their primary research fields as described in the official faculty listing. The school is organized into Film Animation, Film Production, and Film and Moving Image Studies, with affiliated faculty in other departments contributing to cinema‑related research.[^1][^2][^3]
Film Animation – Full‑Time Faculty Research Fields
Luigi Allemano – Film Animation
Luigi Allemano’s work spans animation and experimental sound‑image relationships, with a focus on visual music, film scores, and sound design within cinema. He also investigates abstraction in visual art, pre‑cinematic animation techniques, and animation theory, often through transdisciplinary, improvisatory, and aleatoric music practices.[^1]
Shira Avni – Film Animation
Shira Avni’s research centres on neurodiversity and motherhood, using animated documentary forms such as under‑camera, clay, and direct animation to explore autism, Down syndrome, and gendered experiences of care. Her work emphasizes community‑based animation and social justice, foregrounding diversity and inclusion through collaborative media projects.[^1]
Luc Otter – Film Animation
Luc Otter investigates computer and traditional character animation across clay, stop‑motion, and puppetry, emphasizing the role of the animation director and art direction for film and video. His research expands into media arts, children’s media, visual effects and compositing, linking sculpture and drawing practices to cinematic storytelling.[^1]
Cilia Sawadogo – Film Animation
Cilia Sawadogo focuses on African animation and community‑based film/media production, blending traditional and digital animation techniques to support transnational storytelling. Her research includes children’s media, short animated films, and direct animation practices that engage drawing and computer animation to address cultural narratives.[^1]
Alisi Telengut – Film Animation
Alisi Telengut’s work is grounded in under‑the‑camera and experimental animation, engaging tactile, frame‑by‑frame processes to address environmental humanities. She uses moving‑image art to explore ecological change and more‑than‑human relations, situating animation as a critical mode for environmental storytelling.[^1]
Film Production – Full‑Time Faculty Research Fields
Sofia Brockenshire – Film Production
Sofia Brockenshire, an assistant professor in cinema, contributes to film production pedagogy and practice, with interests implied in contemporary moving‑image creation and teaching within the program. Her role supports development of craft‑based and conceptual approaches to filmmaking in Concordia’s production curriculum.[^1]
Jean‑Claude Bustros – Film Production
Jean‑Claude Bustros researches generative storytelling and responsive environments, designing urban‑embedded cinema and screen‑based reactive arts that respond to viewers and contexts. His work explores interactivity, intelligent images, and hypercinema, investigating spatialized, ubiquitous computing approaches to experimental screen culture and future cinema.[^1]
Daniel Cross – Film Production
Daniel Cross, a professor of film production, is associated with documentary and socially engaged filmmaking, with recognized contributions to cinema that engage communities and global issues. His teaching and practice integrate film/media production with questions of ethics, collaboration, and representation in contemporary documentary cinema.[^2]
Roy Cross – Film Production
Roy Cross’ research centres on fiction filmmaking, scriptwriting, and cinematography, especially in black‑and‑white 35mm and 16mm formats and silent film aesthetics. He emphasizes low‑budget, sustainable lab processes, independent features and shorts, and non‑toxic film processing methods that sustain artisanal production cultures.[^1]
Guylaine Dionne – Film Production
Guylaine Dionne, associate professor and MFA program head, works in film direction and production, with a focus on narrative cinema and documentary. Her research engages independent filmmaking practices and the mentoring of graduate‑level film production through the MFA Cinematic Arts program.[^4][^1]
Richard Kerr – Film Production
Richard Kerr, professor of film production, is known for experimental moving‑image practices and film/media production. His work explores materiality of film, montage, and alternative modes of cinematic representation within independent and art‑house contexts.[^2]
Louise Lamarre – Film Production
Louise Lamarre researches moving‑image technologies through the Holo Editorial Layering Process and l’Atlas Cinematographique, investigating novel editorial and spatial approaches to film. She works across fiction craft, documentary making, directing, screenwriting, and creative producing, including music videos, television, corporate films, and multi‑platform broadcasting.[^1]
Marianna Marta Milhorat – Film Production
Marianna Marta Milhorat focuses on moving‑image arts and experimental film and video, particularly hybrid non‑fiction forms that blur boundaries between documentary and art cinema. Her research engages environmental art, Anthropocene studies, ecofeminism, and sound art, using film as a medium to interrogate ecological crisis and embodiments of place.[^1]
Michael Yaroshevsky – Film Production
Michael Yaroshevsky, associate professor and undergraduate program director for film production, contributes to the shaping of Concordia’s production curriculum and cinematic practice. His work links pedagogy, film craft, and narrative filmmaking, supporting student‑driven creative research in cinema.[^2][^1]
Film and Moving Image Studies – Full‑Time Faculty Research Fields
Farah Atoui – Film and Moving Image Studies
Farah Atoui’s research engages postcolonial and decolonial media and film, focusing on visual culture and activism around borders and migration. She studies cinema and video art from the Arab world and its diasporas, emphasizing transnational media‑based solidarity and critical border imaginaries.[^1]
Luca Caminati – Film and Moving Image Studies
Luca Caminati researches postcolonial theory, orientalism, and transnational cinema, with a particular emphasis on Italian film and cultural histories of cinema. He examines travel films, globalization, and documentary film as sites where visual culture, politics, and historical narratives intersect.[^1]
May Chew – Film and Moving Image Studies / Art History
May Chew works at the intersection of interactivity, immersion, and public art, examining socially engaged visual and material cultures. Her research includes museums and archives, critical race and settler/postcolonial studies, affect, haunting, and spectrality in contemporary cultural practices.[^1]
Cael Marcas Keegan – Film and Moving Image Studies
Cael Marcas Keegan researches transgender and queer phenomenologies, theories, and moving images, analysing trans/queer media, video games, and LGBTQ+ cultural production. Their work links affect studies, popular screen cultures, and media histories to questions of gender, sexuality, and representation.[^1]
Martin Lefebvre – Film and Moving Image Studies
Martin Lefebvre specializes in general and applied semiotics and philosophy of art, examining modern and postmodern film through Peircean pragmatism and Wittgensteinian language theory. His research spans narrative theory, cultural studies, Quebec cinema, and key filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Eisenstein, Truffaut, and Godard, often within the context of film theory and aesthetics.[^5][^1]
John Locke – Film and Moving Image Studies
John Locke, professor of film studies, contributes to film theory and historiography within the School of Cinema, focusing on critical analysis of moving‑image texts. His work supports the intellectual framing of cinema history and theory in the program’s curriculum.[^2][^1]
Erin Manning – Film and Moving Image Studies / Studio Arts
Erin Manning’s research addresses process philosophy, neurodiversity, and research‑creation, linking ProTactile practices, blackness, and ecology in art and cinema. She explores collaborative, sensorial modes of making as philosophical inquiry, emphasizing embodied and relational approaches to moving‑image media.[^1]
Rosanna Maule – Film and Moving Image Studies
Rosanna Maule focuses on women and film/media, feminist media studies, and creative economy, including women’s cinephilia and contemporary auteur cinema. Her research extends to national cinema theories, screen culture, history of the moving image, and French, Italian, and Spanish cinemas through feminist and critical theoretical lenses.[^1]
Joshua Neves – Film and Moving Image Studies
Joshua Neves, Canada Research Chair and director of the Global Emergent Media Lab, researches global media, digital culture, and overdevelopment, with particular attention to China and Asia. His work in cultural and political theory interrogates emergent infrastructures, platformization, and uneven global media formations.[^6][^1]
Nicolas Renaud – Film and Moving Image Studies
Nicolas Renaud, faculty member in cinema, contributes to film and moving‑image studies with work that bridges Indigenous perspectives, documentary, and experimental audiovisual practices. His research supports cross‑disciplinary engagement between cinema, Indigenous methodologies, and contemporary moving‑image creation.[^1]
Peter Rist – Film and Moving Image Studies
Peter H. Rist researches film histories with a focus on Canadian and South American cinema, as well as East Asian and African film cultures. He has edited and authored historical dictionaries of regional cinemas, examining filmmakers and film festivals across diverse global contexts.[^7][^1]
Catherine Russell – Film and Moving Image Studies
Catherine Russell’s work spans cinephilia, experimental cinema, Japanese cinema, ethnographic film, and women and film/media. She integrates cultural studies and film/media theory to study moving‑image historiography, North American cinema, melodrama, and archival film practices, often through the lens of urban futures and sound.[^8][^1]
Masha Salazkina – Film and Moving Image Studies
Masha Salazkina researches transnationalism and Marxist theory in cinema, focusing on Latin America, Soviet film, and histories of film theory and criticism. Her work examines Third Cinema, New Latin American Cinema, global socialist and postsocialist cultures, postcolonialism, and film institutions such as festivals and educational structures.[^9][^1]
Marc Steinberg – Film and Moving Image Studies
Marc Steinberg studies digital platforms, platform economics, and media industries, directing The Platform Lab at Concordia. His research connects transmedia, Japanese anime, character merchandising, and East Asian media cultures to broader questions of digital culture, internet history, and media theory.[^10][^1]
Ishita Tiwary – Film and Moving Image Studies
Ishita Tiwary, Canada Research Chair in Media and Migration and assistant professor in cinema, researches video cultures and platforms in relation to migration and media infrastructures. She investigates informal media practices and how they shape mobility, labour, and transnational communication through contemporary video technologies.[^11][^1]
Haidee Wasson – Film and Moving Image Studies
Haidee Wasson’s research covers museology, feminism, and moving‑image technologies, emphasizing portable film technologies and cultural histories of cinema. She studies film/media historiography, women and media, emergent media, and critical curatorial practices across cinema, television, web videos, and media arts.[^12][^1]
Affiliated and Emeritus Faculty (Cinema‑Related Research)
Affiliated Faculty – Selected Cinema‑Related Fields
Charles R. Acland specializes in media and cultural theory, film and moving‑image studies, and audiovisual technology, contributing historical perspectives on popular culture and media industries. Mia Consalvo’s work in game studies examines qualitative methods, new media, and popular culture, intersecting with moving‑image and interactive media analysis.[^1]
Krista Lynes, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies, studies contemporary art and activism, feminist and queer theory, migration and globalization, and environmental humanities through media infrastructures. Johanne Sloan researches contemporary and Canadian art since the 1960s, visual culture, and urban art, offering perspectives on landscape and aesthetics applicable to cinematic visual studies.[^1]
Emeritus Faculty – Cinema Histories and Theories
Marielle Nitoslawska, professor of film production emeritus, is known for film direction and production, contributing to Concordia’s historical development of cinema pedagogy and practice. Thomas Waugh, distinguished professor emeritus, researches documentaries, film/media theory, queer studies, and sexual representation, particularly within Canadian and Quebec cinema and activism. His work explores pornography, homoeroticism, HIV/AIDS, and social change through documentary and moving‑image forms.[^13][^2][^1]
References
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[PDF] MEL HOPPENHEIM SCHOOL OF CINEMA - Concordia University