FLEFF

Stewart Auyash is the voice of public heath on the Ithaca College campus where he teaches courses on U.S. and international health policy issues, health communication and consumer health. He developed his public health passion at the University of North Carolina where he received an MPH, sharpened his public health teeth working for the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office, and honed his public health voice while getting his PhD in speech communication at Penn State. He is currently an associate professor at Ithaca College and will be a visiting professor of health communication at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore beginning in January 2010.

Rodrigo Brandão is Director of Publicity at Kino International, a distributor of international art films. He also runs BrazilNYC.com, a website which focuses on Brazilian culture and events in New York City. In FLEFF’s new blog Latin American Spaces, Brandão hopes to profile and discuss works by select artists who are producing challenging and politically progressive works –with a focus on film, politics, installation art, the internet and new/digital media. 　　While a student at Ithaca College in the 1990s, he doubled major in Cinema and Photography and Art History.

Georgekutty A. L is the founder editor of Deep Focus Film Quarterly and the Secretary
of Bangalore Film Society. A graduate in political science from Bangalore University he holds diplomas in Indian and western philosophy and world religions from St. Antony’s Friary, Bangalore, in film studies from the National Film Archive of India Pune, and The Film and Television Institute of India Pune, and in Human Rights from the Institute of Social Sciences, The Hague.  In 2004, he was on the selection committee of the Mumbai International Film Festival for documentary, short and animation films for the International Competition and a  jury member of the Environmental Film Festival, Freiburg, Germany. He is also the founder and  director of  the international film festival ‘Voices from the Waters’, a traveling film festival, and coordinates the Breakthrough Tricontinental Film Festival, Human Rights in Frames in Bangalore and its outreach programmes in South India. He has coordinated study abroad programmes for the University of Iowa in 2005 and 06 for the Centre for Informal Education and Development Studies, Bangalore. He organizes thematic film festivals and conferences  for institutions and the public on contemporary social issues to explore how cultural politics impact and shape modern cultural practices, politics, aesthetic sensibilities and social behavior.
 

Jairo Geronymo is a Brazilian - American pianist and educator currently living in Germany. He has taught piano at Pacific Lutheran University (Washington State), Western Washington University, Ithaca College and currently at the Leo Kestenberg Musikschule (Berlin). An active soloist and chamber musician, he regularly performs and gives workshops in Brazil, Canada, Europe, and the United States. A winner of many competitions in Brazil and the United States, he performs as a recitalist, chamber musicians and orchestral soloist with groups such as the Sao Paulo State Symphony, Brazilian Symphony, Northwest Sinfonietta, Lake Union Civic Orchestra and Eastside Symphony (Seattle). 

Alexandra Halkin is a documentary video producer and Founding Director of the Chiapas Media Project/ Promedios de Comunicación Comunitaria. In 1995, she developed the Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios, a bi-national partnership that provides video and computer equipment and training to indigenous communities in southern Mexico. Since 1998, the CMP/Promedios has trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in Chiapas and Guerrero, Mexico. CMP/Promedios award-winning videos have been broadcast in Mexico, US, Canada, and New Zealand and screened at film and video festivals, universities and museums worldwide. She has consulted with Witness and the Latin American Coordinator for Indigenous Film and Communication( CLACPI).

Jan-Christopher Horak is Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and an Adjunct Professor in Critical Studies. His publications include  Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Lovers of Cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (1995), The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood's Golden Age (1989) as well as over 250 articles and reviews in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Hebrew publications. He is preparing a monograph on Saul Bass amd a major exhibition on the "L.A. Rebellion." 

Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos.  His work on global  cinemas and new media appears in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film. He has worked as a co-curator of new media art for FLEFF since 2006.

Vadim Isakov worked as an international reporter for Agence France-Presse in Central Asia. He arrived in Ithaca in 2007 to teach journalism in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. His research focuses on the role of citizen reporting in authoritarian societies, the development of social media in Central Asia and the concept of authoritarian deliberation in the region. In 2006, he was recognized as one of the most prominent bloggers in Uzbekistan and named "the most exciting discovery" of the Uzbek blogsphere. He is currently involved in the citizen media project,  NewEurasia.net, a website which covers Central Asia in seven different languages through the eyes of local bloggers.

Nicholas Knouf is a PhD student in information science at Cornell University exploring the interstitial spaces between information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies. His project include  MAICgregator, a Firefox extension aggregating information about the military-academic-industrial complex; Fluid Nexus,  a mobile phone message sharing application designed for activists and relief workers to circumvent a centralized cellular network; robotic puppetry projects  engaging  psycho-socio-political imaginaries; and sound works. He has received an Honorary Mention by Prix Ars Electronica in [the next idea] category (2005), the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) for his master's thesis (2008), a memefest Award of Distinction (2008), a special transmediale "Online Highlight" (2009), and a "Turbulence Spotlight" (2009). hHs work has been featured in ID Magazine, the Boston Globe, CNN, Slashdot, and Afterimage.  For more, see his website zeitkunst.org

Cecelia Lawless is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University from where she received her Ph.D. in Compatative Literature. Her interest in film is long-standing. In 1995, she went to Venezuela with a Fulbright to research documentary filmmaking. Since then, she has published and given talks on Latin American film and architecture, with a special focus on Cuba and Venezuela. Her book, Making Home in Havana (Rutgers Press, 2002) is a study of the home space through image and testimonials. She also serves as Latin American curator for FLEFF. She is thrilled to be a part of the Open Cinema/Cine Abierto project.

Sharon Lin Tay is an academic, theorist, and curator. She teaches film and digital theory at Middlesex University in London, England, and has co-curated the new media art exhibition for FLEFF for the last three years. Her new book about women filmmakers and digital artists, entitled Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (2009), is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Ulises Mejias is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies department at SUNY Oswego, where he teaches classes on social networks and the web, videogame theory and analysis, technoculture studies, and media economics. His research interests include network studies, critical theory, philosophy of technology, and political economy of new media.

Anjali Nerlekar is an Indian academic who has lived and taught in educational institutions in India, Bahrain and the United States. She is an assistant professor of English at Ithaca College where she teaches world literature. She also serves as the South Asian curator for FLEFF. Her research areas are South Asian literature and culture (with particular emphasis on Indian poetry and theater), Indo-Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature. Her articles have appeared in journals like Wasafiri, South Asian Review and Writing on the Edge . Currently, she is working on a book project on Indian poetry.

Kole Ade Odutola is a Nigerian poet, photographer, teacher, environmental and cultural activist, videographer, culture communicator  He worked as a radio show presenter, producer, and photojournalist. He holds two master’s degrees, one in TV/Video for development from the University of Reading, UK and another in organizational communication, learning and design from Ithaca College.  As guest of the Goethe Institute, Bremen, he was invited to learn to speak German. Kole is the author of The Poet Fled and The Poet Bled. He has had papers and poems published in cross-continental journals and anthologies,  such as For Ken, For Nigeria, Junge Nigerianische Lyrik, and many other venues. Currently, he teaches Yoruba language and culture at the University of Florida while putting the finishing touches to his doctorate in media studies. One of his passions is to open up African political spaces so that more faces can be seen in places of power contributing to the growth and development of the continent.

Claudia Costa Pederson lives in Ithaca where she is preparing her dissertation on the work of artists using digital games and play for social critique at the History of Art and Visual Studies Department, Cornell University. Originally from Lisbon, she lived in the north of Portugal, The Hague, and Los Angeles. Along the way she picked up a few languages, and an interest in examining histories about the relationship of media with artistic and social energies. Before focusing on Art History, she produced radio and video works in collaboration with women artists and political refugees involved with the squatting movements in the Netherlands and Germany. She also worked in political organizing. Nowadays, she likes to think of her work as a media archeology. She can be contacted at ccp9@cornell.edu

Thomas Shevory is professor of politics at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. He is the author of five books, including Body/Politics: Studies of Production, Reproduction and Reconstruction (Praeger), Notorious HIV: The Media Spectacle of Nushawn Williams (Minnesota), and Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle against the WTI Incinerator (Minnesota). He is currently living in Ulaanbaator, Mongolia, where he is teaching and researching as a Fulbright scholar at National University of Mongolia.

J. Carlos Vázquez Velasco (Basque Country, Spain) is the Director of Kultura, Communication and Development (KCD). KCD's goal is to utilize communication as a tool for social and cultural development. He is also the Founder of the International Invisible Cinema Film Festival ("Filme Sozialak")　in Bilbao and the Network of Communicators, CAR. Since 1988, Carlos has been working in area of Cooperation and Education for Development. For 16 years, he directed a socially engaged film series in four cities and various small towns in the Basque Country. From 2005 to 2009 , he was a consultant to the Coordinator for the Latin American Indigenous Film and Communication (CLACPI). Carlos has been a juror at The VII International Indigenous Film and Video Festival, Wallmapu (Chile), 2004; V Cine Pobre Film Festival, Gibara, Cuba, 2007; VI International Small Film Festival, Canary Islands, 2007; and awarded the Telesur prize in the IX International Indigenous Film and Video Festival, Bolivia, 2008.　

Patricia Zimmermann is professor of cinema, photography and media arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author and/or coeditor of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana), States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California), and The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle). In 2010, she will be the Shaw Foundation Professor endowed chair of New Media Technology in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.