Images Research Forum

The Images Research Forum is an educational initiative that takes place during the 31st edition of Images Festival. Understanding the need to support the creation and dissemination of critical thinking and dialogue, Images Festival invites emerging colleagues to explore contemporary moving image culture within the context of the festival and with mentorship from leading international curators, artists, and researchers in the field.

We received many outstanding applications this year, and are excited to congratulate and welcome our 13 Research Forum participants!

Aaditya Aggarwal is a writer and editor based in Toronto. He was the 2016 Online Editorial Intern at Canadian Art, and the Programming Coordinator at the 2017 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.

Nour Bishouty's autobiographical practice revolves around the research and making of multidisciplinary works which draw upon familial and material narratives. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited internationally. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2014) and was a fellow at Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2014⁄15). Bishouty lives and works in Toronto as a visual artist and designer.

Jaclyn Bruneau is a writer and editor in Toronto. Her work engages film, memoir, queerness, grief, power and the absurd. In 2017, she completed a year-long research project on contemporary criticism and participated in Fan Wu and Art Metropole's Close Workshop on grief and mourning. She took part in The Banff Centre's Critical Art Writing Ensemble II in 2016 and was the Editorial Resident at Canadian Art in 2015. She's the managing editor of MICE.

Caroline Doherty is an artist and educator based in Buffalo, NY. She employs multiple mediums, including performance, video, sculpture, and public projects. She has been selected for residencies including the Squeaky Wheel Workspace Residency in Buffalo; the SOMA Summer Program in Mexico City; Guapamacataro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacan, Mexico; and ArtPark in Lewiston, NY. Her work has been exhibited throughout North America, in Europe, and in China.

Born and raised in Bulgaria, Ralitsa Doncheva is an artist - filmmaker based in Montréal. Working with experimental and expanded approaches to documentary, dream and reality, her projects have screened internationally in galleries and in cinema theatres. Her recent film Baba Dana Talks To The Wolves won The Eileen Maitland Award at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is currently developing a new cinematic installation using analogue film techniques and photochemical processes.

Eleanor Ford is a curator and researcher currently at the University of Toronto. With a focus on the politics of space, they co-founded and curated Cherry & Lucic in Portland, Oregon, participated in the 2016 Portland Biennial, and co-facilitated a course titled "Project Space Industrial Complex" for the pop-up art school home school. Their current research focuses on sites of nuclear testing and the intersections of scientific inquiry and late-liberalism.

Esmé Hogeveen is a reader, writer, and editor based in Toronto. She’s currently a PhD candidate in the Art History and Visual Culture department at York University and has previously studied at the University of King’s College (BA), the Pacific Northwest College of Art (MA), and the School of Criticism and Theory program at Cornell University. Her interests include auto-theory and ficto-criticism, cyberfeminism, and alternative pedagogies, and she is a current Collective Member at M,I,C,E. Magazine.

Steffanie Ling is a writer, film and art critic and a curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Her art and film writing has appeared in The Hong Kong Review of Books, Canadian Art, San Francisco Art Quarterly, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, among others. In 2016 she participated in the Young Critics Workshop led by film essayist Kevin B. Lee at the Cairo International Film Festival. She is an editor of Charcuterie, a journal of experimental art writing and polemics and has published two books of prose, NASCAR (Blank Cheque, 2016) and a book of minimal poems, CUTS OF THIN MEAT (Spare Room, 2015).

Almudena Escobar López is an archivist, curator, and writer from Spain. She is a PhD student at the University of Rochester, and has written for publications including MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage, Film Quarterly and Desistfilm Magazine. She serves in the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. She is member of the collective screening project On-Film, and co-programmed (with Herb Shellenberger) the Flaherty Seminar series ‘Common Visions’ at Anthology Film Archives.

Tak Pham is a Vietnamese new media art curator, art critic and architectural historian based in Toronto. Pham’s curatorial approach concerns the spatial experience of exhibition architecture. Pham’s academic research has been examining the contemporary consequences of modern architectural movements, and how contemporary art can respond in order to remedy and ameliorate them. Pham actively looks for adaptive-reuse architectural projects and opportunities, not only to investigate their sites, but also, to reimagine their possibilities.

Zainab Saleh holds a Masters degree in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester where she co-founded On Film, a film series that aims to exhibit rarely-seen work in their original formats. Zainab is interested in the intersections between comics and film, interactive storytelling, and all things data. Zainab was a Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow in 2015, and served on the selection committee for the 2017 Summer Residency program at Squeaky Wheel Media Art Center.

Shelby Shaw is a multidisciplinary writer based in New York, where she is the co-editor of the biannual art and literary journal, Storyfile. Shelby is the program coordinator for Projections, the New York Film Festival’s section devoted to premiering artists’ films and experimental moving images, and she works with the programmers at the IFC Center in Manhattan.

Fan Wu is a writer and community organizer who works at the intersection of film, literature, and continental philosophy. He hosts critical reading / creative writing workshops through Art Metropole. You can find his most recent work, on cruising and Tsai Ming Liang, at MICE Magazine: http://micemagazine.ca/issue-three/cruising’s-spectral-intimacies-four-scenes. Send him dreams and love letters at fanwu2@gmail.com.