Biographies
Heba Amin is an Egyptian artist and scholar and, currently, a lecturer in the Media and Computing department at the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin (HTW). She received her MFA at the University of Minnesota, USA and is a recent DAAD (German Academic Exchange) grant recipient and a Rhizome Commissions grant winner. Amin’s scholarly and artistic work has been presented at several conferences, published and exhibited worldwide. hebaamin.com
Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo studied Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan (1983 -86). He has been an arts and culture journalist for over two decades, working as the Arts and Media Editor of The Guardian (Daily) and serving as outgoing editor of The Guardian on Sunday. He also operates as a culture activist and programmer whose input in various projects have helped define the character as well as shape the development of Nigeria’s arts and culture scene. As such he led the Prime Culture Advocacy group in Nigeria, the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), to launch the yearly Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF).
Mohamed Beshir is a filmmaker and editor based in Cairo. He holds an MFA in filmmaking (screenplay writing and editing) from the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts, Jordan. His writings on film are featured in Egypt Independent and Nisimazine. Beshir is a member of the artist-research project Take to the Sea, a collective project looking into illegal migration patterns between Egypt and Europe. He is also a co-founding member of Cimatheque - Alternative Film Center.
Roy Dib is an artist and an art critic. He has cofounded the theater group Zoukak (2006–2009). He has presented works at venues and events such as Video Works (Beirut), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), and Videobrasil (Sao Paulo). He currently writes for the cultural section of Al-Akhbar newspaper, Beirut. www.roydib.com
Tarek Elhaik is a media anthropologist, film curator, and assistant professor of Media & Culture at San Francisco State University. His work is informed by a research on Mexican experimental media arts and an ethnography of curatorial platforms in Mexico City. He also curated several experimental cinema programs from Latin America and the Arab World at the Pacific Film Archive, Ruhrtriennale, San Francisco Cinematheque, Tangiers Cinematheque, and Rice University. He has recently completed a book titled Incurable-Image (Untimely Futures): Lessons from Mexico.
Heinz Emigholz began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer and producer in Germany and the USA. He looks back on numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures and publications. He was professor for Experimental Filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 1993 to 2013. Since 2012 he is a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. www.pym.de
Anselm Franke is Head of Visual Arts and Film Department at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and since 2005 co-curator of Forum Expanded. He was curator at KW Berlin and director of Extra City in Antwerp. His curatorial projects include the Taipei Biennial 2012 and Manifesta 7 in Italy as well as many solo and group shows, including the multi-part exhibition "Animism" (2010-2014) as well as most recently the show "The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside" (together with Diedrich Diederichsen), and "After Year Zero. Geographies of Collaboration".
Vinzenz Hediger is professor of film studies at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. His research areas include Film theory, film history, history of film theories, marginal film forms and utility films (industrial film, science film, educational film).
Nanna Heidenreich is assistant professor in Media Studies at the University of the Arts (HBK) in Braunschweig, Germany and co-curator of Forum Expanded. Her work (in curating, writing and teaching) focusses on visual culture, the intersections of politics, activism and art, image wars, migration and anti racism. She lives and works in Berlin.
Henriette Huldisch is currently a curator at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporay Art - Berlin, where she recently curated “Harun Farocki: Serious Games” as well as “Body Pressure: Sculpture since the 1960s”. Since 2010, Huldisch has also served as Visiting Curator at Cornerhouse, Manchester. From 2004-2008, Huldisch was assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and curated or co-curated exhibitions such as the 2008 Whitney Biennial; “Small: The Object in Film, Video, and Slide Installation”, “Full House: The Whitney’s Collection and 75”; and many others.
Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan video artist born in Casablanca. Raised between Casablanca and Paris she studied cinema at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Visual Arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts, Paris-Cergy. She lives and works between Paris and Berlin. Bouchra Khalili’s work in video, mixed media installations, photography and prints, combines a conceptual approach with a documentary practice to explore issues of clandestine existences, and political minorities.
Gertrud Koch is professor for film studies at the Free University Berlin. She has been involved in numerous research projects and has been a visiting professor in Brasil, Israel, France, and USA. Among her many publications are Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung (English translation in preparation to published at Stanford University Press), and Siegfried Kracauer. An Introduction (2000). She is co-editor of the journal Frauen und Film and on the advisory board of many other periodicals, such as October.
Birgit Kohler is a Co-director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. Member of the selection committee for the International Forum of New Cinema of the Berlin Film Festival. Program curator and film studies scholar. Curatorial projects focussing primarily on the contemporary documentary filmmaking, on current international film (including Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Olivier Assayas, Pedro Costa, Denis Côté, Claire Denis, Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomes, Brillante Mendoza, Agnès Varda and Apichatpong Weerasethakul) as well as Arab cinema from the Maghreb and the Middle East. Various teaching engagements (most recently: Curation in Theory and Practice), lectures and texts.
Dennis Lim is a writer in New York. He is currently director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, editor of Moving Images Source, contributing editor of Cinema Scope and was formerly the film editor of The Village Voice. He writes for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times and other publications and teaches in the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University.
Renate Lorenz is an artist and cultural scientist, mostly in the fields of Art and Queer Theory. She is showing her art work internationally (together with Pauline Boudry). Her most recent English publications are Queer Art (Transcript, 2012) and the artist book Temporal Drag (Hatje Cantz 2011). She is professor for art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. www.boudry-lorenz.de
Maha Maamoun is an artist living and working in Cairo. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and biennials worldwide. She has also co-curated several exhibitions and art projects. Maamoun is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) in Cairo.
Laura Mulvey is British feminist filmmaker and theorist. She is the author of the seminal essay „Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“ (1975) and numerous other influentsial publications. She has made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen (including RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX (1977)) and with Mark Lewis. Mulvey is professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has collaborated with Faysal Abdullah and Mark Lewis for 23rd August 2008
Irit Neidhart is working in the field of cinema and the Arab World as producer, lecturer/writer, and curator based in Berlin. She was born in Germany in 1969 and brought up in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She was managing an adult education centre in Germany and teaching at SOAS in London before founding mec film in 2002, a production and distribution company for films exclusively from the Middle East. www.mecfilm.de / www.iritneidhardt.de
Tamer El Said is an Egyptian filmmaker based in Cairo. He wrote, produced and directed numerous films. His first fiction feature In the Last Days of the City was shot in Cairo, Berlin, Baghdad and Beirut and is currently in post-production. He is co-founder of several independent initiatives in Cairo, including Cimatheque, Mosireen, and Zero Production. ww.lastdaysofthecity.com / cimatheque.org.
Jörn Schafaff is assistant professor at the collaborative research center Aethetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits at the Free University Berlin. Between April 2009 and December 2010 he was part oft he HGB-team of the Master’s program Curatorial Cultures at e Von April 2009 bis Dezember 2010 war er Teil des HGB-Teams des Masterstudiengangs Kulturen des Kuratorischen at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. He is also building an archive of the works of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film scholar and film and video curator. She lives and works in Berlin, where she is co-director of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, a member of the selection committee for the Berlinale Forum, and founder and director of the Berlinale program Forum Expanded. Since 2011 she has also been director of the project "Living Archive - Archive Work as a Contemporary Curatorial and Artistic Practice."
Marcel Schwierin is a curator, filmmaker and also a co-founder of the Werkleitz Biennial, the experimental film database cinovid and the Arab Shorts festival in Cairo. Since 2010 he is curator film & video of transmediale. www.schwierin.de
Viola Shafik is an Egyptian-German sholar, curator and filmmaker . She has directed a number of documentaries and is the author of the books Arab Cinema and Popular Egyptian Cinema. She has worked as a consultant for international film festivals and film training programs, including La Biennale di Venezia, the Dubai Film Connection and the al-Rawi Screenwriters Lab. She is also a member of the selection committee of the World Cinema Fund at the Berlinale.
Marc Siegel is assistant professor in Film Studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and a member of the advisory board of Forum Expanded. His research focuses on avant-garde film and queer studies.He curated the exhibition on George Kuchar at the Berlin Biennial (2010) and co-curated the festivals Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life (Berlin/Frankfurt, 2012) and LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World (Berlin, 2009).
Bettina Steinbrügge is co-curator of Forum Expanded since 2007 and newly appointed director of The Kunstverein in Hamburg. From 2010-2013 she was curator of contemporary art at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. Having previously taught as a research assistant in the faculty of cultural sciences at the University of Lüneburg, Steinbrügge has been teaching in the postgraduate master programme CCC at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva since 2009.
Gregor Stemmrich is professor for art history / art theory at the Free University Berlin. His research focuses on the art of the 20th and 21st century, art and media theory, art and cinema, exhibition cultures, and transcultural conditions. The prolific writer has published numerous books and articles. Among his publications in English are a book on Dan Graham (2008) and Listening to HEARING (on Robert Morris multimedia work HEARING, 2011).
Rania Stephan is a Lebanese–born filmmaker who has been working with and in film for the last two decades. After obtaining a degree in Cinema Studies from Australia’s Latrobe University and a graduate degree from Paris VIII University she has worked as a first assistant, a camera operator and editor with renowned filmmakers such as Simone Bitton and Elia Suleiman. In her own work she focusses on what Stephan calls "the archaeology of images, identity, and memory."
Ala Younis is an artist and curator born in Kuwait and based in Amman, Jordan. She graduated as an architect from the University of Jordan in 1997. Younis’ artistic practice is engaged in the reinterpretation of inherited narratives by research-based sociopolitical investigations deeply concurrently explored with the personal experience. Through art, film, and publication projects, she unfolds the conditions under which collective historical and political collapses can become personal ones. www.alayounis.com
