Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors A l i a A r a s o u g h l y is director general of Shashat, a women’s cinema NGO in Palestine, and curator of its annual “Women’s Film Festival in Palestine,” the long est running women’s film festival in the Arab world. She is also a filmmaker and her directing credits include Ba`d As-Sama’ Al-Akhirah ( After the Last Sky , 55 minutes), The Clothesline (14 minutes), and Hay mish Eishi ( This is not Living , 45 minutes), which has been translated into five languages and shown at over 100 international film festivals. Alia has worked as an expert trainer and development professional in the area of media and gender on major projects for international organizations such as UNDP, UNFPA, and UNIFEM. She has been responsible for intensive training/production programs for young women filmmakers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1996 she co-organized and co-curated, with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the landmark five-week-long festival, Centennial of Arab Cinema. She also co-organized the First Retreat between Arab women filmmakers and Arab critics in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1997. Alia has taught and lectured internationally on issues of postcolonialism, gender, and national identity in Arab cinemas. She has received prestigious academic fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Nicholas Balaisis is lecturer in Cultural Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. He recently completed a PhD in Communication and Culture at York University, Toronto, writing a dissertation on cinema, spectator- ship, and the Cuban public sphere. His research interests include globalization and the transnational flow of images; media and the reshaping of urban space; melodrama; film and the public sphere; and mobile media. In connection with the latter, he has written about the history of mobile cinema exhibition in Cuba and plans a comparative study of mobile cinema in rural China. Nicholas serves on the Board of Directors and Programming Committee of the Regent Park Film Festival, a free multicultural film festival serving the residents of the Regent Park neighborhood in Toronto, the oldest and largest public housing development in Canada. He is also co-investigator of the Visible City Project + Archive at York University and has published journal articles in Cineaction , Public , and Canadian Journal of Film Studies . Anton Basson holds a cum laude MA in Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is the head of Curriculum Development 262 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS at the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA). A playwright, poet, lyricist, and short story writer, he taught linguistics and narrative at a number of universities in Johannesburg before joining AFDA as lecturer in Scriptwriting and in various leadership capacities. Gerda Dullaart chairs the Academic Standards Council at the AFDA film school in Johannesburg and Cape Town and lectures on Film Narrative and on Research Methodology. Gerda worked in journalism, copywriting, and script doctoring before joining AFDA in 2003. She wrote her PhD thesis on curriculum objectives for skills and attitudes useful to BA graduates pursuing film and media careers. Armida de la Garza is associate professor in Communication and Media at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She is also co-editor of the Transnational Cinemas journal (Bristol: Intellect). As a researcher, she is interested in film and its rela- tion to cultural identity, especially national identity, and in audience reception. She has published essays on the links between documentary and diaspora (in Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page, Visual Synergies: Fiction and Documentary Filmmaking in Latin America , Palgrave, 2009) and realism in Latin American cinema (in Lú cia Nagib and Cecí lia Mello, Realism in the Audiovisual Media , Palgrave, 2009). She is currently working on a collaborative research project entitled Transnational Cinema in Globalising Societies: Asia and Latin America . The focus is on those films that are produced for the global market but still sold as national productions, and on the ways in which audiences engage with them in their countries of origin to make sense of their identity. Mette Hjort is associate vice president and chair professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, where she is also director of the Centre for Cinema Studies. She is affiliate professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and adjunct professor at the Centre for Modern European Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is the author of The Strategy of Letters (Harvard University Press, 1993), Small Nation, Global Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Stanley Kwan´s “Center Stage” (Hong Kong University Press, 2006), and Lone Scherfig’s “Italian for Beginners” (University of Washington Press, 2010). She is the editor or co-editor of a number of books, including, most recently, Film and Risk (Wayne State University Press, 2012), and Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies (with Meaghan Morris; Hong Kong University Press, 2012). A third volume in a series of interview books with Danish directors is forthcoming as Danish Directors 3: Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema (with Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Novrup Redvall; Intellect, 2013). Mette Hjort is foundation fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. She co-edits the Nordic Film Classics Series with Peter Schepelern for the University of Washington Press and Museum Tusculanum. Scott MacKenzie is author of Screening Qu é bec: Qu é b é cois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Guy Debord for the French Filmmakers Series (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Cinema and Nation (with Mette Hjort; Routledge, 2000), Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95 (with Mette Hjort; NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 263 BFI, 2003) and The Perils of Pedagogy: The Films and Videos of John Greyson (with Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh; McGill-Queens University Press, forthcoming). He is co-investigator of the Visible City Project + Archive at York University and has published in such journals as Cineaction , Public , Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Screen . Christopher Meir is lecturer in Film at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, where he has been teaching since 2008. He completed a PhD project at the University of Warwick on the production and international circulation of Scottish cinema. He is currently preparing a manu- script based on his doctoral thesis for Manchester University Press and working on a comparative study of the film industries of the nations of the Commonwealth. T o b y M i l l e r is professor of Cultural Industries in the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at the City University of London. He is the author of numer- ous books, including The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Contemporary Australian Television (with Stuart Cunningham; University of New South Wales Press, 1994), The Avengers (BFI, 1997/Indiana University Press, 1998), Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Popular Culture & Everyday Life (with Alec McHoul; Sage, 1998), Global Hollywood (with Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell; BFI/University of California Press, 2001) and Cultural Policy (with George Y ú dice; Sage, 2002). His edited or co-edited books include SportCult (with Randy Martin; University of Minnesota Press, 1999), A Companion to Film Theory (with Robert Stam; Blackwell, 1999), Film and Theory: An Anthology (with Robert Stam; Blackwell, 2000), A Companion to Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2001). His most recent books are Greening the Media (Oxford University Press, 2012), with Richard Maxwell, and Blow Up the Humanities (Temple University Press, 2012). His work can be followed at tobymiller.org. Hamid Naficy is the John Evans Professor of Communication, teaching screen cultures courses in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film, at Northwestern University. His areas of research and teaching include documentary and ethno- graphic films; cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media; and Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas. He has published extensively on these and related topics. His English language books are: Iran Media Index (Greenwood Press, 1984), The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (edited, Routledge, 1998), Otherness and the Media: the Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (co-edited, Harwood Academic, 1993), and, most recently, the four-volume project entitled A Social History of a Century of Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2011–2012). He has also published extensively in Persian, including a two-volume book on the theory and history of documentary cinema, Film-e Mostanad ( Entesharate-e Daneshgah-eAzad-e Iran, 1978 ). He has lectured widely internationally and his 264 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS works have been cited and reprinted extensively and translated into many languages, including French, German, Turkish, Italian, and Persian. Osakue Stevenson Omoera is

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