Work-in-Progress PhD Symposium

//February 27th

//2:00-5:00 PM

//GEM Lab, FB 630.15

//1250 rue Guy

The inaugural Work-in-Progress PhD Symposium brings together graduate students in film and media to share ongoing doctoral research. Across two panels, presenters explore how moving-image practices are reshaped by circulation, technological change, and archival reconfiguration – from streaming platforms and multiview interfaces, to orphan films, design pedagogy, and low-tech media histories. The moderated panels highlight new and developing projects, and aim to foster discussions around research methodologies, future directions, and fieldwork.

Presenters:

Marie Martraire, “From Scarcity to Multiplicity: How Versions Transform Video Art in the Age of streaming”

Marie Martraire is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University and Curator & Collection Director at the contemporary art nonprofit KADIST. Her research examines the intersection of contemporary art and video cultures in the age of streaming, with a particular attention to digital aesthetics. Formerly Director of KADIST San Francisco, researcher-in-residence at MMCA Seoul, and program manager at the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium, among other positions, she has co/curated exhibitions and film programs internationally. Her writing has been published in Journal for Curatorial Studies, Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, LEAP, SFAQ, and more. Martraire is also a Research Assistant at the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University and serves on the board of the San Francisco Film Cinematheque.

Insook Park, “Multiview’s Multiple Dimensions” (via Zoom)

Insook Park is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. Her research focuses on media technology, digital aesthetics, and contemporary spectatorship.

Amir Hossein Siadat, Exploring the Representation of the Private Sphere in First-Person Documentaries by Iranian Women Filmmakers (2011–2024)”

Amir Hossein Siadat is a film researcher, teacher, and critic, currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. A member of the Association of Iranian Film Critics, he has contributed film articles for over 15 years to Iranian magazines including Film, Chāhār, Filmkhāneh, and Cinema va Adabiāt. He served as Director of the Cinematheque at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art for more than five years and has curated several international film weeks in Iran. Last year, he co-authored a book with Sahar Khoshnam examining Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Shatranj-e Bad (The Chess of the Wind, 1976). Some of his writings in English are available on his personal website: www.amirsiadat.com.

Han Yang, “Digital Archival Earthquake and the Reparative Critical Practice of Orphan Films”

Han Yang is a PhD candidate from the Department of Film Studies at the Beijing Film Academy, and is currently a visiting doctoral student at Concordia University. His research interests include film and the archive, film preservation and restoration, film curation, and film history.

Sudipto Basu, The Lure of Low-Tech: Appropriate Technology and Design Pedagogy in the National Institute of Design, India (1960s-70s)”

Sudipto Basu is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. He studies the mutual entanglements of global histories of media, technology and design with development experiments in rural India during the Cold War, between the 1950s-80s, through overlapping networks of funding, epistemes, infrastructures, and field-sites between the West and India. He has won a Fonds de Recherche du Québec doctoral grant; and works with the Global Emergent Media Lab and Governing Through Design research group.