2017 Speakers

Sarah Atkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at King’s College London. Sarah has been publishing, researching and teaching in the areas of Digital Storytelling and Digital Audience Cultures for 15 years. The main body of her work is focused upon the nature of emergent narratives and new modes of audiences and engagement. Along with Helen W. Kennedy, Sarah jointly undertook the first piece of national industry research into the Live Cinema sector with Live Cinema UK, funded by Arts Council England Grants, and she is currently collaborating on a Creative Europe funded project: Live Cinema in the EU.

Joseph Attard is a PhD student at King’s College London, investigating how novice audiences engage with opera via digital simulcasts to cinemas (‘opera cinema’). This research is jointly supervised by King’s College London and the Royal Opera House, with whom he has organized the first academic symposium on the specific topic of opera cinema. More generally his academic interests straddle media theory and the social sciences. He is particularly interested in exploring subjective audience experience to interrogate the intersections of media technologies, exhibition spaces, audience formations and political economy.

Lisa Brook is the director of Live Cinema UK: the country’s only organisation focused on bringing artists, exhibitors, distributors and producers closer together to create amazing experiential cinema projects. Live Cinema UK recently launched the Live Cinema Talent Pool to support emerging musical, digital and VR talent to create new work in the cinema sector. The organisation has also conducted the world’s first industry research into live cinema in partnership with King’s College and the University of Brighton, culminating in the world’s first Live Cinema Conference, which returns for its second edition in 2018. LCUK regularly commissions new work with funding from Arts Council England, the BFI and Creative Europe, and work with a who’s who of clients and partners across the UK and internationally, including Sheffield Doc/Fest, the BFI, Leeds International Film Festival, and the National Media Museum, with collaborating artists including DJ Yoda, Mica Levi, Norman Jay MBE and Asian Dub Foundation.

Lavinia Brydonis Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent, UK. Her research interests centre on space and place in film culture, extending from questions of representation to current debates on pop-up cinema, location filming and screen media tourism. She has published on these topics in several journals, including SERIES: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives and Journal of   British Cinema and Television.

Virginia Crisp is a Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is the author of Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Palgrave, 2015) and co-editor of Besides the Screen: Moving Images through Distribution, Promotion and Curation (Palgrave, 2015). She is the cofounder, with Gabriel Menotti Gonring (UFES, Brazil), of the Besides the Screen Network (www.besidesthescreen.com). She has published widely on film distribution, media piracy and film cultures.

Olu Jenzen is Principal Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research focuses on the politics of aesthetic form and popular culture. She has also published on popular culture and youth activism and the aesthetics of protest on social media. She is the principal investigator on the AHRC project ‘The People’s Pier’.

Nia Edwards Behi, based in Aberystwyth, UK, is co-director of Abertoir, Wales’ International Horror Festival, a member of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation. Nia is also an independent film scholar and critic, specialising in horror and related genres.

Matthew Jones is Associate Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University. He is a specialist on mid-twentieth-century cinema audiences and memories of cinema going. He is the author of Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety (Bloomsbury, 2017) and was awarded a British Academy Rising Stars Engagement Awards grant for his workshop series, ‘Cinema, Memory and the Community’. Drawing on almost 1000 people’s recollections of attending British cinemas, collected through an AHRC project at UCL, he produced ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’, an immersive experience that was performed in Leicester and London in 2016.

Helen W. Kennedy is Head of Media at the University of Brighton. Her research interests are feminist games culture, innovations in experience design and the cultural evaluation of live experiences. She is lead researcher on REFIG – an international project that seeks to transform the games industry, games education and games culture funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Publishing widely in game studies and the emergent field of live cinema, her work focuses on the intersections between performance, play and narrative in the design and experience of live cinema.

Josephine Machon is Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance at Middlesex University, London. She is the author of Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (2009, 2011), and has published widely on experiential and immersive performance. Josephine is Joint Editor for The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Performance & Technology. Her broad research interests address the audience in immersive theatres and the creative intersections of theory and practice in experiental performance intersections of theory and practice in experiential performance.

Marie McCarthy Training: MA in Theatre Directing (Birkbeck) Award: The Sir Peter Cheeseman award for achievement and innovation.

For Omnibus Theatre: Spring Offensive, Hangmen Rehanged; Dead Boy Café

Other directing credits include: When The Fallen Sang (St Giles in the Fields); The Crucible (Queens Theatre, Hornchurch); Macbeth (Kents Caverns, Torquay); What You Will (Associate Director Cultural Olympiad/Globe Theatre); 1908: Body and Soul (Cultural Olympiad, Henley Festival, Jacksons Lane); Pride and Prejudice (National Tour); Alice in the Walled Garden (Sixteen Feet Productions); The Secret Garden (National Tour); Not In My Name (Associate Director, Theatre Veritae); The Bonds (Oval House Theatre); Wind in the Willows (National Tour); Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Globe Theatre); Regarding X (Old Red Lion); SE1 (Lightning Ensemble); The Chess Players (Wandsworth Arts Festival); The Mayday (Lightning Ensemble); Dissonant World (Hampstead Town Hall); Like Love (European and American Tour); Love and Understanding (Library Theatre Manchester); Losing It (Soho Theatre Studio).

Richard McCulloch is a Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for Participatory Cutlure, University of Huddersfield. His research interests lie in media audiences and reception studies, and he has published widely on topics such as fandom, branding and cult cinema. He is currently writing a monograph on the Pixar Animation Studios brand, and he is co-editor of The Scandinavian Invasion (Peter Lang, forthcoming) as well as the two volume anthology Disney’s Star Wars (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). Richard is co-director of The World Star Wars Project, and he sits on the board of the Fan Studies Network.

Emma Pett is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. She specializes in audience and reception studies and has published in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Cultural Trends, Transnational Cinemas and The Journal of British Cinema and Television.

María Antonia Vélez Serna is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Stirling, working on non-theatrical exhibition and temporary cinema spaces. She is the co-editor and co-author of the Early Cinema in Scotland and website and forthcoming book.

Rosana Vivar is a Lecturer in Communication Studies at Saint Louis University Madrid. She is a researcher of the Nar_Trans Project, a four year study on transmedia narratives and new ways of audio visual fiction at the digital era (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Industry and the University of Granada). Her work focuses on film festival audiences in Spain, involving the study of the ludic aspects of these film events and the use of new media by festival goers. Rosana received her PhD from the University of Granada and her work has appeared in Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, and Secuencias Revista de Historia del Cine.