Panelists

Khalid Abdalla

Khalid Abdalla is a British-Egyptian actor, producer and filmmaker. He studied at Cambridge University and École Philippe Gaulier in Paris.

Thom Anderson

Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965), Olivia’s Place (1966), and "---  -------" (1967, with Malcolm Brodwick). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge’s photographic work. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he completed Red Hollywood, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist.

Ronald Balczuweit

Ronald Balczuweit, born in 1964, lives in Berlin.
Studied theater, film and television studies, Portuguese philology, and Latin American studies at the Free University in Berlin. Researcher in the program of Portuguese cultural studies at the University of Trier and at the dramaturgy program at the Film and Television University (HFF) Konrad Wolf.

Since 2004 lecturer in the art and media program at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Publications on film theory, experimental film, and Portuguese and Brazilian cinema.

Madeleine Bernstorff

Madeleine Bernstorff, Film curator, film researcher, author, Super-8 filmmaker and lecturer, was born in Munich in 1956 and lives and works in Berlin. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions and curatorial projects as well as bringing out a large number of publications both as an editor and author.

Christa Blümlinger

Christa Blümlinger is professor of film studies at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Previously she was a university assistant (1999-2002) and visiting professor (2008/09) at the Seminar for Film Studies at the Free University Berlin. Member of the advisory board to Forum Expanded. Has served as a curator and jury member on various occasions, including the Documentary Film Festival Duisburger Film Week, Berlin's Arsenal Cinema, and the Austrian film festival Diagonale. Numerous publications, particularly on film theory, documentary and avant-garde film, as well as media art.

Arianna Borrelli

Arianna Borrelli works within an interdisciplinary research cluster on the "Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)" funded by the German Research Foundation at the University of Wuppertal. The LHC - the world's largest particle accelerator - started operating in the spring of 2010 at CERN (Geneva) and recently announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. The interdisciplinary project follows how the dialogue between theory and experiment about and around present and future LHC- results unfolds.

Pip Chodorov

Born April 13, 1965 in New York. Filmmaking and music composition since 1972. Studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, NY, and film semiotics at the University of Paris, France. Work in film distribution - previously Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; Light Cone, Paris; and, currently, Re:Voir Video, Paris, which he founded in 1994 to publish experimental films on video, and The Film Gallery, the first art gallery devoted exclusively to experimental film.

Christoph Dreher

Christoph Dreher studied philosophy and political science (Free University, Berlin) as well as film at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB).  He made numerous recordings with the band "Die Haut" (The Skin) between 1980 and 2000. Since the late '80s he has written and directed many documentary films and series, music videos, and other artistic film projects. Since 2001 Christoph Dreher has been professor of film and video at the Merz Academy.

Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, producer and curator. Gender, citizenship and urban scapes are her chosen areas of work. Her films have been screened widely in India and abroad in film festivals, art events and retrospectives. Dutta is also the executive director of "Majlis Manch", a centre for rights discourse and inter-disciplinary arts initiatives in Mumbai, India. The centre is engaged in campaigning for cultural literacy among students and other youth groups, facilitating interfaces among practices of different disciplines, and producing plays, films and multidisciplinary art works.

Tamer El-Said

Egyptian filmmaker, writer and producer Tamer El Said lives and works in Cairo. He studied Film Directing at the High Institute of Cinema, graduating in 1998 with Honourable Mention, and received his Diploma in 2002. He has worked as 1st AD on some of Egypt’s bigger feature films, directed commercials, taught and worked as a producer for a number of production companies. He has directed numerous award winning shorts and documentaries. Work on his first feature, In the Last Days of the City, started in 2008.

Heinz Emigholz

Born in 1948 near Bremen in Germany, Heinz Emigholz trained first as a draftsman before studying philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer, actor and producer in Germany and the USA. He released more than eighty short and long films which are all still in distribution. In 1974 he started his encyclopaedic drawing series "The Basis of Make-Up". In 1978 he founded the film production company Pym Films.

John Erdman

John Erdman was born in 1948 in New York City where he still lives and works. In 1968 while studying at Tufts University in Boston he saw Yvonne Rainer’s "The Mind is a Muscle" and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. This inspired him to move back to New York and begin working with visual artists who were exploring performance. Throughout 1970 he worked with Joan Jonas, and in 1972 after having participated in many of Yvonne Rainer’s large group pieces, she cast him as the male personas in "This is the story of a woman who…".

Azin Feizabadi

Azin Feizabadi is an Iranian-born, Berlin based filmmaker and visual artist. 
In 2009 he launched “A Collective Memory” –an ongoing project, that consists of subjective histories and subconscious facts from past, present and future historical events– concluding in a series of narrative video and film works. Arisen as a response towards the immediate social-political transformations in Iran, and further in the Middle East, “A Collective Memory” uses a poetic grammar to combat the three-act-narrative structure of (his)story telling.

Anselm Franke

Anselm Franke is a curator and author. He is the curator of the Taipei Biennial 2012, and since 2013 he is director of the Visual Art Department at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Since 2005, Anselm Franke is the Co-Curator of the Forum Expanded Program at the Berlin International Film Festival. From 2006 to 2010 he was the director of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp and he was the co-curator of Manifesta 7 in Italy. He is a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Peggy Gale

Peggy Gale studied art history at the University of Toronto and Università degli Studi (Florence), and has published extensively on time-based works by contemporary artists. Her ‘Videotexts’, selected essays centred on narrative issues for artists’ video, was published in 1995 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press and The Power Plant.

John Greyson

John Greyson is a Toronto film/video artist whose works include Fig Trees, Covered, Zero Patience, Lilies, Un©ut, The Making of Monsters and Proteus, engaging such topics as AIDS activism, censorship, gay marriage, copyright and queer solidarity with Palestine. His films have won best film awards at festivals in Berlin, Toronto, Vancouver, Hamburg, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Johannesburg, and been presented at retrospectives in London, Toronto and Montreal.

Ed Halter

Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. He is a founder and director of Light Industry in Brooklyn, New York. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival. He teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts department at Bard College, and is currently writing his second book, a critical history of contemporary experimental cinema in America. www.edhalter.com

Nanna Heidenreich

Nanna Heidenreich is assistant professor in Media Studies at the University of the Arts Braunschweig, Germany (HBK) and a film & video curator. She has worked for many years with the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, where she still co-curates the program 'Forum Expanded' at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). She is also one of the participants of the ‘Living Archive' project of the Arsenal. Her research and curatorial interests focus on the various intersections of art & politics, with a special emphasis on migration and contested images.

Birgit Hein

Born 1942 in Berlin, 1966-1988 created experimental films, performances, and installations with Wilhelm Hein. Co-founder of XSCREEN in Cologne in 1968. Has made her own films since 1991. Starting in 1971 numerous publications on experimental film, including ‘Film im Underground', and ‘Film als Film', Stuttgart 1977. Participated in Documenta 5 in 1972 and Documenta 6 in 1977. Cineprobe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Tours through the USA and Canada as well as Pakistan, India, and China for the Goethe Institute.

Shai Heredia

Shai Heredia is a filmmaker and curator of film art. In 2003 she founded Experimenta – the international festival for experimental cinema in India. She has rapidly developed this event into a significant international forum for artists' film and video. Shai has curated experimental film programs at major film and art venues like the Berlinale Film festival Germany and the Tate Modern UK amongst others. She holds an M.A. in documentary film from Goldsmiths College, London. She has also worked as a Programme Executive with the India Foundation for the Arts (2006-2011).

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz works is an independent writer and publicist and a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is currently researching the topic of ideological criticism and materialist aesthetics, as well as the history of Brazilian underground culture in the 1960s and '70s.

Henriette Huldisch

Henriette Huldisch is a curator at the Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where she has curated ‘Anthony McCall: Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture', ‘Live to Tape: The Mike Steiner Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof' and, with Eugen Blume, ‘Joseph Beuys: 8 Days in Japan and the Utopia of Eurasia'. Since 2010, Huldisch has also served as Visiting Curator at Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Brent Klinkum

Brent Klinkum, film and video curator, was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1960 and lives and works in Caen, France. Klinkum is a founding member of Transat Vidéo and a member of the selection committee for acquisitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2011, he received a grant from the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme.

Gertrud Koch

Professor Dr. Gertrud Koch teaches cinema studies at the Free University in Berlin. Books on Herbert Marcuse and Siegfried Kracauer, on Feminist Film Theory and on the representation of Jewish history. Editor of numerous volumes on aesthetics,  perception and and film theory. Co-editor and board member of journals like Babylon, Frauen und Film, October, Constellations, Philosophy&Social Criticism.

Birgit Kohler

Co-director of the Arsenal–Institut für Film und Videokunst in Berlin. Program curator and film scholar. Member of the selection committee of the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival. Curatorial projects mostly in the area of contemporary documentary film and current international cinema (including Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Pedro Costa, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Claire Denis, Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomes, Heddy Honigmann, Brillante Mendoza, Agnès Varda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Founder and co-editor of the internet magazine ‘nach dem film'.

Stephen Kovats

Stephen Kovats is a cultural and media researcher with a background in architecture and urbanism, currently setting up r0g - an agency for open systems, cultural hacktivism and critical transformation. He was artistic director of transmediale, Berlin's festival for art and digital culture 2008 - 2011 and co-director of the McLuhan in Europe 2011 Centennial Network. Previously he curated the international program at V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, and was director of the 'ostranenie' media art forum at the Bauhaus Dessau during the 1990's.

David Marc

David Marc is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Syracuse, New York. Writing principally about American television and film, he is the author of six books and more than 400 articles and reviews, which have appeared in publications ranging from The Atlantic and The Village Voice to in-flight magazines and peer-reviewed journals.

Laura U. Marks

Dr. Laura U. Marks is the author of "The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses" (Duke, 2000), "Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media" (Minnesota, 2002), "Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art" (MIT, 2010), and many essays. She has curated over 40 programs of experimental media art for venues around the world. She is the Dena Wosk University Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Angela Melitopoulos

Angela Melitopoulos, artist in the time-based arts, realizes video-essays, video installations, documentaries and sound pieces since 1985. Within her research projects she curates exhibitions and symposiums. Her videos focus on duration and time-structures, on mnemonic micro-processes in electronic/digital media and documentation. She is collaborating in political networks in Europe and publishes theoretical articles on her artwork and on mnemopolitics. Many projects deal with migration, mobility, collective memory in relation to geography and media representation and archives.

Thomas Morsch

Thomas Morsch has been a junior professor of film studies at the Free University Berlin since 2009. Director of a research project on the topic of "The Television Series as Aesthetic Form" at the Collaborative Research Centre 626: Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits. Author of "Medienästhetik des Films. Körperliche Erfahrung als Ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino" (Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2011).

Olga Moskatova

Olga Moskatova studied social and economic communication from 2003 to 2009 at the University of the Arts Berlin and at the Université Stendhal Grenoble 3. From 2010 to 2012 she had a doctoral scholarship in the program "Das Reale in der Kultur der Moderne" at the University of Konstanz. Since July 2012 she has been a researcher at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently working on a dissertation on material aesthetics and analogue nostalgia in film shot without cameras.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Wendelien van Oldenborgh lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She took part in the Venice Biennial in 2011, the 4th Moscow Biennial in 2011, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010, and the 11th Biennial in Istanbul in 2009. In recent years her works have been show in the following institutions: Generali Foundation, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; A-Space Gallery, Toronto; ICA, London; at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen in 2010 and at the Forum Expanded in the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.

Winfried Pauleit

Professor at Universität Bremen, works in the areas of film studies, media aesthetics and film education. Publications include: "Filmstandbilder: Passagen zwischen Kunst und Kino" (2004), "Das ABC des Kinos: Foto, Film, Neue Medien" (2009), "Reading Film Stills. Analyzing Film and Media Culture" (forthcoming). He is academic director of the annual International Bremen Film Conference and co-editor of: "Word and Flesh. Cinema Between Text and the Body" (2008), "Cinema Dreams. Projection, Imagination, Vision" (2009), "Learning from the Cinema.

Laurence A. Rickels

Laurence A. Rickels moved to the Coast in 1981 upon completing his graduate training in German philology at Princeton University. While in California he earned a psychotherapy license. He has published numerous studies of the phenomenon he calls "unmourning", a term that became the title of his trilogy: "Aberrations of Mourning", "The Case of California", and "Nazi Psychoanalysis". His most recent publication (in German translation) is "Geprüfte Seelen" (Passagen 2012).

Marc Ries

Marc Ries, received his doctorate in 1995 at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Vienna, in 2000-2001 he was a guest professor for comparative visual theory at the F.-Schiller-University in Jena, from 2006 to 2009 guest professor for media theory at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, from 2010 professor for sociology and theory of media at the Offenbach University for Art and Design. Research and publications in the areas of technical media, media cultures, and art.

Stefan Ripplinger

Stefan Ripplinger, free-lance writer, based in Berlin. Publications on art, film and literature, notably "Die Zeichen des Messias", a reader with texts by and about Isidore Isou ("Schreibheft", 78 / 2012).

Constanze Ruhm

Constanze Ruhm is an artist, filmmaker and curator. From 1987-1993 she studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 1991-1993 at the Institute for New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. In 1996/97 visiting professor for visual communication at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. In 1998 she received a grant from the Schindler program at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 1999-2006 she was on the board at secession in Vienna.

Susanne Sachsse

Susanne Sachsse is a Berlin-based actress and director. She has extensive theater experience and was a member of the Berliner Ensemble where she worked with, among others, Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef and Robert Wilson. In 2001, Sachsse co-founded the art collective CHEAP, with whom she develops performances, installations and club projects.

Frieder Schlaich

Frieder Schlaich is a German producer, writer and director. After studying visual communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, his debut film Halfmoon, based on writings by Paul Bowles, received numerous awards and international critical acclaim. His subsequent film Otomo starring Isaach de Bankolé and Eva Mattes, based on the true story of an African immigrant in Germany's Stuttgart, won Best Film at Bergano and Diversity in Spirit Award at Vancouver in 2000.

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film and video curator who lives and works in Berlin. She is Co-Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (with Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler) and Member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum and founding director of Forum Expanded, a section of the Berlin International Film Festival which negotiates the boundaries of cinema. Her curatorial work comprises numerous film programs, retrospectives and exhibitions, among them Michael Snow, Guy Maddin, Heinz Emigholz, Birgit Hein, Ulrike Ottinger, Stephen Dwoskin and many others.

Marc Siegel

Marc Siegel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt. He recently published "Reproducing W+B Hein’s Material Films," W+B Hein: Materialfilme (Edition Filmmuseum München) and is currently working on two books which introduce the work of two very distinct artists: American underground drag superstar Mario Montez and German artist and filmmaker Ludwig Schönherr. Siegel's projects

Michael Snow

Michael Snow works in many media: film, video and sound installation, photography, holography, music, bookworks, sculpture, painting, and drawing. His visual artworks are widely collected and exhibited, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Power Plant (Toronto), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Hara Museum (Tokyo), Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Centre Pompidou (Paris).

Lisa Steele

Lisa Steele is an artist, writer and curator, working in collaboration with Kim Tomczak. She is a co-founder of Vtape and Graduate Program Director of the Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto.

Juan Suárez

Juan A. Suárez is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Murcia (Spain). He is the author of the books "Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars" (1996), "Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday" (2007), and "Jim Jarmusch" (2007) and of many essays on modernist literature and experimental film. Recent essays and articles have appeared in the magazines Grey Room, ExitBook, and Mousse, and in edited collections such as "Mixed Use, Manhattan", eds. D. Crimp y L. Cooke (Cambridge: MIT Press 2010), "Dominó Caníbal", ed.

Ela Troyano

Ela Troyano is a Cuban-born writer and director based in New York City. Her films, theater and performances have been shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, INTAR Theater, the Arsenal in Berlin, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville. Her films include the PBS documentary La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul, the half-hour short Carmelita Tropicana, which won the coveted Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and her feature film, Latin Boys Go To Hell.

Lioudmila Voropai

Lioudmila Voropai is a curator, art critic and media theorist. She studied Philosophy, Art History and New Media Art in Moscow (RGGU) and Cologne (KHM). The key subjects of her theoretical research are critical theory, institutional critique, discourse analysis and sociology of contemporary art as well as related problems of cultural policy.

Dorothee Wenner

Dorothee Wenner is a freelance filmmaker, writer and curator specialized on cross-cultural issues. She has been a programmer with the International Forum/Berlinale since 1990, she also curates Indian films for the Dubai International Film Festival. Her latest films include DramaConsult (2012) which documents the journey of five Nigerian entrepreneurs to Germany,

Nicole Wolf

Nicole Wolf lives in London and Berlin. She is a researcher and lecturer at the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and curates film events. Her work circles around international histories of political cinemas and she is particularly interested in the varied explorations of documentary practices taking place in South-Asia. Recent collaborative curatorial projects are: "Persistence Resistance. Documentary Practices in India" (London, 2011), "Moving Politics – Cinemas from India" (Berlin, 2010), "No Man’s Land" (London, Karachi, Cornell University, 2007-2012).

Klaus Wyborny

Klaus Wyborny began making films in the late 1960's, following several years of studying theoretical physics, and was part of the explosive generation of New German Cinema filmmakers that included Harun Farocki, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Werner Schroeter, Alexander Kluge, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Over the past 40-plus years, Wyborny has created a rich, varied body of work that blurs the boundaries between experimental, documentary, and essay filmmaking.

Ala Younis

Ala Younis is an artist and curator based in Amman. Through art, film, and publication projects, Younis investigates the position of individuals in a politically driven world, and the conditions in which historical and political conditions of the collective become personal ones.

Siegfried Zielinski

Siegfried Zielinski holds the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at the Berlin University of Arts, he is Michel Foucault Professor for Techno-Culture and Media Archaeology at the European Graduate School Saas Fee, and he is director of the International Vilém-Flusser-Archive in Berlin. He published numerous books and essays with focus on the Archaeology and Variantology of the Media.

Mike Zryd

Michael Zryd is an Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the Department of Film at York University in Toronto. He has served as Archivist of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and was founding co-chair of the SCMS Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group. He is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada. His research areas include Hollis Frampton, experimental film and media, documentary, and the history of the discipline of cinema and media studies.