IFM 2025 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
The organizing committee can be reached by email: ifmjournal@torontomu.ca
Hudson MOURA Chair
(Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)
Dr. Hudson Moura teaches film, media, global justice, and digital studies in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. He also holds an associate faculty position in the Immigration and Settlement Studies Program at the Yeates School of Graduate Studies. Beyond academia, Dr. Moura is a film critic for French Radio Canada. His scholarly work focuses on the politics of race, migration, gender, and minority issues—encompassing Indigenous, Black, anti-racist, trans-, feminist, and queer perspectives—in the context of technology, media, and digital practices. His research has been presented at numerous international conferences and published in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. His forthcoming book, L'Image-Exil, will be released by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion in France. Currently, Dr. Moura is working on a new book that explores the representation of refugees in film. Dr. Moura also chairs the IFM-Interactive Film and Media Annual Conference, now in its seventh edition. This growing, exclusively online event brings together a diverse worldwide group of scholars and practitioners in digital studies and interactive practices in games, film, and media across multiple platforms. Spanning four days, the conference fosters intensive discussions and exchanges on the latest advancements and challenges in these fields. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the IFM Journal, which plays a vital role in advancing these conversations and innovations within the community.
(The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Heidi Rae Cooley is an associate professor and serves as co-director of the Public Interactives Research Lab at The School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas. Cooley investigates what it means to live in an age when mobile devices have become our partners, when our accessories keep track of our steps toward optimal health, when the landscapes around us are ever “smarter” and more responsive to our movements. Instead of interpreting mobile media as surveillance apparatuses, freedom machines, or both, she considers the routine practices—that is, habits—they engender and revise. To explore habit-change in the mobile connected present, she has collaborated with interdisciplinary teams to design geo-locative software applications that present unacknowledged histories of place (see: http://calliope.cse.sc.
(Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland)
Dr. Stefano Odorico is a Reader in Contemporary Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University where he is the director of IRIS (International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling). He has published numerous works on film and media theory and practice, documentary studies, and interactive documentaries. He is the vice-chair of the MeCCSA (Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association) practice network and he is a co-founder and member of the editorial team of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. He is currently collaborating with Dr. Judith Aston on a project focusing on polyphonic documentary theory and practice.
(New York University Abu Dhabi, UEA)
Dale Hudson is an associate professor at NYU Abu Dhabi in the Film and New Media Program and the MFA in Art and Media. His latest book is Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana UP, 2024) co-edited with Alia Yunis. He has curated for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) since 2007 and coordinated Films from the Gulf for the Association of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Association (AGAPS) at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Film Festival since 2016.
(University of York, England)
Jenna Ng is Professor in Digital Media and Culture at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on digital media and culture, on which she has published extensively. Her books include Understanding Machinima: Essays on Films in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) which was awarded an Honourable Mention by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). Working across a range of media, Jenna also produces creative projects with practice-based methodologies. Her work has won numerous prizes, including the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis, the MeCCSA Practice Based Research of the Year, and the Learning on Screen Special Jury Prize. She is currently writing a book about the existential tensions of being human in the age of AI.
(Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA)
Leah Shafer, Associate Professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges since 2008, specializes in Television History, Advertising, Visual Culture, and Digital Media. She holds degrees from Cornell University and has taught courses such as American Cinema, Media and Society, and The Video Essay. Her scholarly contributions include articles in journals like Film Criticism, chapters in notable anthologies, and experimental documentaries like "Declaration of Sentiments." A member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the National Association for Media Literacy Education, Shafer is known for her dynamic teaching style that encourages critical analysis of media texts. She is co-editing the upcoming book, "Fifty Years of Women Media Makers: from New Hollywood to YouTube."
(NOVA FCSH, Portugal)
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MARTA FIOLIĆ is a visual artist and researcher, PhD student in Cinema at NOVA FCSH. At the same faculty, she is part of the CINELAB of the Nova Institute of Philosophy and the working group on Cinema & Politics. In 2021 she received a scholarship from FCT to develop her PhD thesis "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – It Will Be Digitized: Towards the Analysis of Activism Practices in Contemporary Online Documentary." As an integral part of the practice-based research, she produced a collaborative interactive documentary with the SOMOS MULHERES association, an NGO organised and run by women who have been experiencing homelessness in Lisbon. Having graduated in History and in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia she went on to earn Master’s degrees in Modern and Contemporary History and in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in 2014. At the same university, she explores photography and video through the classes of Cinematography and Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and photojournalism at the Faculty of Political Science. Between 2015 and 2019 she was a multimedia manager at CHAM - NOVA FCSH, producing audiovisual works that accompanied the scientific investigation. Her interests lie between arts and activism, the intersection of civic culture, documentary and interactivity. In 2022, she co-founded εntropiα, an art collective dedicated to the exploration and fusion of sound, music, and image, with a strong sense of social and community engagement.
(Kingston University, England)
Il Sun Moon is a PhD student in film and photography at Kingston University and an artist in the experimental practice. Throughout her academic experience in communication design in China, Japan, and the UK, she gradually became attracted to the poetic practice of the moving image and atmospheric expansion in its spatiality. Her work was presented at Stanley Picker Gallery, and her practice-based research was presented at various conferences and published in the Body, Space & Technology journal. Moon's practice challenges the conventional structure in cinematic spatial qualities and aims to deliver the importance of producing a synthesising body of work between research, moving image practice, and personal experience.
Logan Hamilton Acton (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer currently working in North Texas. Acton earned his BA in Art & Performance and his MA in Aesthetic Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas, going on to study at the Kansas City Art Institute and complete his MFA in Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is pursuing his PhD in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UTD through research focused on digital craft. Combining sculptural installation with video, animation and performance, Acton’s art practice explores a speculative cartography. Through a propositional system paring mythic figures with extreme music, his work meditates on meaning and the psychological constructs through which we navigate contradictory experiences. Acton previously taught in the rigorous mentor-based Foundation program at the Kansas City Art Institute, and has led instruction across wide-ranging subjects including Perception, Visual Forces, Spatiality, and Temporality. Acton is formerly a Co-director / Co-curator with the artist-run gallery plug and Co-founder / Principal of the brand strategy and design consultancy the ARGOT/NOTS.
Dr. Sonali Sharma teaches Digital Media Arts at A.J.K Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. Her practice-based doctoral research focuses on the intersection of documentary, mobility & interactive media practices. She has presented her work at conferences like Interactive Film and Media, i-Docs 2018, and Visible Evidence XXII. Before joining academia in 2010, she worked as a media practitioner with television broadcast channels NDTV Profit and Zee Sports. Some of her work as a cinematographer-editor includes audio-visual documentation for NGO Save the Children, editing India & Indian culture-centric features for FOXTEL, Australia, during the Commonwealth Games 2010; co-directing a short film, On the Verge (a film on the changing landscape of Delhi) for Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), India.