Ingrid is a media researcher and phenomenologist with a broad interest in the human-technology relation, mediated embodiment, networked interfaces and screen cultures. She has published on topics such as scientific technovision, virtual and augmented reality, games, mobile media, urban screens, remix culture and web-based content creation and distribution. She has led and co-led a number of research projects that have explored mobile media and game practices, and deployed creative interventions with the aim of enhancing wellbeing, self-efficacy and social inclusion. Recent co-authored books include Ambient Play (MIT Press, 2020), Exploring Minecraft (Palgrave, 2020) Understanding Games and Game Cultures (Sage, 2021), and Mobile Media and the Urban Night (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Polly Stanton is a lecturer and supervisor in the Masters of Media program. Her films and installations focus on contested sites, presenting landscape as a politically charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital. Sound and listening also play a critical role in Stanton’s work, as a process of attunement and as a means to attend to what is unseen and excluded. Stanton’s mode of working is expansive and site based, with her practice intersecting across a number of disciplines from film production, sound design, field research, performance, writing and publication. Her work has been exhibited in both local and international spaces and she has undertaken numerous residencies and workshops across Europe, Australia and the UK. Stanton completed her PhD Fields of Resonance: Towards Embodied Forms of Listening and Looking in the School of Art in 2018, and is co-editor of the book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (Onomatopee Projects, 2022).
Catherine Strong is a Senior Lecturer in the Music Industry program. She is a leading researcher on gender inequality in Australian music. Her work also looks at memory, history and heritage in relation to popular culture, as well as careers in music. She is the author of Grunge: Music and Memory, co-author of Music City Melbourne, and co-editor of Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage and Death and the Rock Star. She is co-editor of the journal Popular Music History and serves as a member-at-large on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.
Djoymi Baker is Lecturer in Cinema Studies and formerly worked in the Australian television industry. She writes on children’s screen cultures, myth in popular culture, film and television genres, and the ethics of representing the non-human on screen, from animals to aliens. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (IB Tauris 2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (Rowman & Littlefield 2014).
Associate Professor Marsha Berry is author of Creating with Smartphones (2017, Palgrave MacMillan) and is co-editor of two volumes on mobile media. She is an ethnographer, writer and artist whose practice includes filmmaking, participatory art projects, and poetry. She has published extensively in international journals such as New Media and Society and New Writing as well as in edited books. Her work has been exhibited Australia and internationally in galleries including the Directors Lounge in Berlin and the Queensland Centre of Photography.
Dr. Daniel Binns is a theorist of media and screen cultures, currently researching the intersection of materiality, computation, and entertainment. Daniel has published work on the Netflix house style, drones and cinematography, video game engines as filmmaking tools, film genre and superhero movies and TV. He is the author of The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq (2017), and Material Media-Making in the Digital Age (2021). His work has been cited in the Journal of Popular Culture, Black Camera, Pop Matters, and the Journal of International Relations and Development, and he has presented his research in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Greece, and the Czech Republic. Daniel has also worked as a screenwriter, director, producer and production manager on corporate films, television documentaries, multi-sensory experiences and short-form works. His film work has been selected for over a dozen international festivals and streaming services.
Shelley Brunt is Senior Lecturer and Program Manager of the Bachelor of Arts (Music Industry) degree. As a popular music ethnomusicologist, Shelley focuses on ethnographic approaches to understanding music-media cultures in Japan, New Zealand and Australia. She is the co-editor of Perfect Beat: The Asia-Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture, and major publications include Popular Music and Parenting (Routledge 2022), and Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge 2018). One of her long-running research projects considers identity, community and gender in a Japanese televised song contest, seen in the forthcoming monograph Kōhaku utagassen: The Red and White Song Contest (Bloomsbury). Other studies include posthumous duets in Asia, and Australia’s entries in the Eurovision Song Contest. Current activities include the NCIP funded research project Encore: A co-designed career guidance program for women restarting in music with Assoc Prof Catherine Strong.
Ella is a lecturer in Professional Communication at RMIT. She completed her PhD at QUT in 2018, and has an industry background in corporate communication and stakeholder management. Ella’s interdisciplinary research interests span the fields of popular culture, political communication, public relations, journalism, and media studies. She is particularly interested in how film and television is used by everyday audiences to make sense of, and engage with, the world.
Adrian Danks is a teacher, editor, curator, award-winning critic and essayist. He is Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and Media, at RMIT University, co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque (since 1991), and was an editor of Senses of Cinema between 2000 to 2014. He is author of the edited collections, A Companion to Robert Altman (Wiley, 2015) and American-Australian Cinema (Palgrave, 2018, with Steve Gaunson), and the forthcoming monograph, Australian International Pictures (with Con Verevis, Edinburgh UP, 2023). He has published hundreds of essays and book chapters on cinema, with a specific focus on Australian and Iranian cinema, film history, and film authorship. He has also contributed essays to DVD collections released by Criterion, Madman, the BFI, Arrow and Masters of Cinema, and has served on the selection committees, curatorial boards and judging panels of organisations like the Melbourne International Film Festival, ATOM, AACTA, ACMI, Experimenta, ReelDance and the Big West Festival.
Hugh Davies is a creative producer, curator and researcher. His practice centres on the Asia Pacific Region and explores screen media and cultures of games and play. Awarded a PhD in Art, Design and Architecture from Monash University in 2014, Hugh’s research activities have been supported with fellowships from Tokyo Art and Space, M+ Museum of Visual Culture and the Hong Kong Design Trust. Hugh is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Media and Communications.
Sonia Leber is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Art at RMIT. Sonia works through the collaborative duo Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, known for their distinctive video, sound and architecture-based installations that are audible as much as visible. Their practice draws on cinematic methods (visual and sonic) to build up highly detailed and conceptual videoworks that emerge from social, architectural and technological settings, hinting at unseen forces and non-human perspectives. Solo exhibitions include ‘Where Lakes Once Had Water’, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2022), and Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2022); ‘What Listening Knows’, Messums Wiltshire, UK (2021); and ‘Architecture Makes Us: Cinematic Visions of Sonia Leber & David Chesworth’, CCP, Melbourne (2018), UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019) and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2019). Group exhibitions include the 56th Venice Biennale: All The World’s Futures (2015); and the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire (2014).
Ramon Lobato is an Associate Professor (ARC Future Fellow) in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. Ramon’s research interests include film and video distribution, piracy, and transnational media. He is the author of Netflix Nations, Shadow Economies of Cinema and The Informal Media Economy (with Thomas). A former DECRA Fellow, Ramon currently leads the ARC Discovery Project ‘Internet-Distributed Television: Cultural, Industrial and Policy Dynamics’, based at RMIT and QUT.
Adrian Dyer researches complexity by employing visual modelling of many real world scenarios of high value to human existence. With photographic and film images this often includes eye tracking of visual attention. A major focus is on digital imaging to collect high quality empirical data to allow for robust analyses and model validation, and working with a variety of domain experts to construct digital representations of complex behaviours to interpret relationships of primary importance for resource management. This work thus involves a broad set of international collaborations for which he has attracted widespread funding support, won several prestigious Fellowships (Alexander von Humboldt, La Trobe University, ARC QEII), and resulted in publications in the world’s leading journals like Nature, Science and PNAS. Adrian is the leader of the Bio-Inspired Digital Sensing Lab, which recently won the VC research team excellence award. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication.
Lisa French is Dean of RMIT’s School of Media and Communication and Professor of Screen and Media. Her extensive screen industry experience includes directing the St Kilda Film Festival, serving nine years on the board of the Australian Film Institute, and producing several documentaries. She is a lifetime member of the AFI and WIFT, an international member of AACTA, and internationally recognised as one of Australia’s foremost scholars on women in film and television. As co-chair of the UNESCO Network for Gender, Media and ICTS she has advocated for women’s access to media. She is currently a member of the Screen Australia Gender Matters Taskforce and sits on the Editorial Board of The Conversation. Her books include The Female Gaze in Documentary Film – An International Perspective (2021); Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute (2009); and Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia (2003). See: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2893-9098
Tami Gadir is a lecturer in the Music Industry program at RMIT with a broad interest in how music works in society and culture. Her current research deals with the sounds, cultures, people, and technologies of electronic dance music through the conceptual lenses of intersectional feminism and anti-capitalism.
Stephen Gaunson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where he teaches undergraduate courses on Australian cinema, film adaptation, and documentary studies. His cinema scholarship shifts between Australian cinema, film adaptation, silent cinema, film exhibition and classical Hollywood. He is the author of The Ned Kelly Films (2013, Intellect Books) and has co-edited a number of collections on the history of film exhibition and distribution. He most recently co-edited (with Adrian Danks and Peter Kunze) the book American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections (Palgrave, 2018). In 2017 he was the recipient (with Dr Alexia Kannas) (with Dr Alexia Kannas) of the Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, Australian Awards for University Teaching. He is currently working on a project about better ways to incorporate history narrative films into the secondary school history curriculum.
Mark Gibson is the Associate Dean in the School of Media and Communication. He has interests in cultural and creative industries, the history of media and cultural studies, comedy, the role of audiences in cultural production and the contributions of fringe, independent and avant garde scenes to mainstream media. His recent projects have included ‘Creative Suburbia’, looking at creative practices in the suburbs and ‘Fringe to Famous’, on the crossover between fringe and mainstream cultural production in Australia since the 1970s. He is author of Culture and Power—A History of Cultural Studies and (with co-authors, forthcoming) Fringe to Famous—Indie and Mainstream Cultural Production in Australia. Before joining RMIT, Mark held positions at Monash, Murdoch and Central Queensland Universities. He was also editor, for thirteen years, of Continuum—Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
John Hughes’ independent film and video for gallery, broadcast and cinema is formally innovative and research driven. Topics assayed through his projects traverse Australian labour history, Indigenous rights and critical theory. Over recent years, a number of John’s projects have focused on Australian documentary film history, in particular the early post-war and Cold War years. John’s works are collected by galleries in Australia and internationally. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2017. The Films of John Hughes: a history of independent screen production in Australia (Cumming, 2014) is published by ATOM. He is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communications
Alexia Kannas is Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where she teaches courses in Cinema Studies. Her research interests include cult and alternative cinemas, cinematic modernism, cross-cultural reception,and music and sound in film and television. She is the author of Deep Red (Columbia University Press/Wallflower, 2017) and GIALLO!: Genre, Modernity and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema (SUNY, forthcoming 2020). In 2017 she was the recipient (with Dr Stephen Gaunson) of a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning at the Australian Awards for University Teaching.
Dr Patrick Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Media in RMIT University’s School of Media & Communication. He is a filmmaker, media producer, and artist interested in the impact of new technologies on screen production, and collaborates with queer and indigenous communities on films, mobile apps, and other media projects.
Shweta Kishore is a filmmaker, curator and lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. Her research focuses on Asian media and documentary, activist and grassroots media, women’s film making, and practices of independent and alternative modes of cinema production and circulation. Shweta is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice (2018: Edinburgh University Press) and currently working on her next book about contemporary forms of resistance in Indian independent documentary. In her current video-based research project, Shweta examines the relationship between the field of contemporary art, gender and feminist discourse in Vietnam. She curatesis the ongoing curator for the screen based workshop Moving Reels: A Social Dialogue at the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City and previously curated Artist Cinema: A view from Vietnam at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India.
Dr Alan Nguyen is a writer, director and designer working in TV (SBS, ABC, NBCU, Disney+, Princess Pictures, Matchbox Pictures, December Media) theatre (Melbourne Theatre Company) and multisensory interactive experiences (Australia Council for the Arts, EyeJack). Alan was a writer for the SBS television miniseries ‘Hungry Ghosts’ (Matchbox/NBC Universal), nominated for AWGIE and AACTA awards in 2020. He is interested in the ways that storytelling and emerging technologies can be used to share diverse experiences, provide education, promote well-being and strengthen social connection. Recent interdisciplinary research projects include ‘Polyphonic Motions’ (Australia Council for the Arts), ‘Melodic Motions’ (Department of Social Services) and ‘BeeScapes’ (Creative Victoria). Alan is a Lecturer in the Media program at RMIT University.
Adjunct Professor Murray Pomerance is a scholar and writer with a global reputation in screen studies. His numerous field-defining works include a Hitchcock Quartet, including A Voyage with Hitchcock, but his publications number in the dozens. These include The Film Cheat (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018, Edinburgh UP). He serves as editor for two distinguished series at major academic presses: ‘Techniques of the Moving Image’ at Rutgers, and SUNY Press’s prestigious ‘Horizons of Cinema.’ Seeing the world with a poet’s eye, his writing on cinema is enriched by his wide-ranging knowledge in other disciplines: literature, sociology, theatre, performance, architecture, music, and art history and he is also an O. Henry Award-winning author whose fiction includes Grammatical Dreams (Green Integer, 2020) and A King of Infinite Space (Oberon, 2016).
Paul Ritchard is a filmmaker who lectures in film production across both the undergraduate and Masters of Media programs in the School of Media and Communication. His research focuses on film, media production and eco-aesthetics. He is the co-author of a number of ERA-recognised creative outputs and academic publications. His PhD is titled The River Project: A Poetics of Eco-Critical Film-Making.
Ian Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication. He is the author of numerous articles on musician ideologies, music policy and music history.
Jacqui Shelton is a sessional tutor in the school of Media and Communications. Her work uses text, sound, performance, filmmaking and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. She is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible. She has produced exhibitions and performance works in association with numerous Australian and international institutions, including the Institute of Modern Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, MPavilion, Gertrude Contemporary, Arts House, Incinerator Gallery and West Space. She also regularly publishes writing in publications including Meanjin, Artlink, Disclaimer journal, and unMagazine. Jacqui completed her PhD, Listening Across a Distance in 2019 at Monash University.
Joel Stern is a researcher, curator and artist living in Naarm / Melbourne and a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in Media & Communication. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work focuses on emerging practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. Between 2013 and 2022, Stern was Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture, leading the organising and developing artistic research projects such as Eavesdropping, Machine Listening, Polyphonic Social, Why Listen?, Instrument Builders Project, and Ritual Community Music. With James Parker of Melbourne Law School, Stern curated Eavesdropping, an exhibition, public program, and publication, at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and City Gallery, Wellington. Stern’s PhD ‘Eavesdropping: The Politics, Ethics, and Art of Listening’ was completed in 2020 in the Curatorial Practice program at Monash University. In 2020, with Parker and Sean Dockray, Stern founded Machine Listening, a platform for collaborative study, experimentation and resistance focused on the techno-politics of sound and big data.
Stayci Taylor completed her PhD (20176) on gender, comedy and screenwriting, following a decade of writing for television. She is co-editor of two books on script development (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), and another on the iconic Australian TV shows Prisoner and Wentworth (Peter Lang 2022). Her association with Melbourne Webfest (as juror, mentor, pitch judge, panel moderator and RMIT partnership manager) runs alongside her track record producing scholarship on script development for web series. Her screenwriting-as-research has been presented at conferences and symposia internationally, and published in outlets such as TEXT journal. She co-convened 2018’s international conference Wentworth is the New Prisoner, with an edited collection forthcoming. She won an RMIT prize for research excellence (2017), and continues her professional practice as a screenwriter and script consultant.
Allan Thomas currently manages the School’s Honours program. He is interested in the epistemological questions raised by intersection of film and philosophy in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and is currently working on Karl Popper’s proposition of ‘knowledge without a knowing subject’ as the starting point for a materialist epistemology of cinematic thought.
Cassandra Tytler is an artist working within single-channel video, performance, and video installation. Her work explores contemporary cultural iconography and the idealised signs that exist within it. She is particularly fascinated by the symbolism of popular clichés, and within her work pastiches isolated and fragmented cultural conventions as an exploration of the power relations that are created and get repeated within them. She has received funding support and fellowships from numerous organisations such as the Monash Academy of Performing Arts, NARS Foundation, NYC, Druskininkai Artists' Residence, Lithuania, Sumu Artist in Residence program, Turku, Finland, The Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France, The Cité des Internationales, Paris, The Australia Council, The Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, American Australian Association. Tytler completed her PhD at Monash University Faculty of Art in 2020. She is a sessional staff member across both undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the School of Media and the School of Art.
Liam Ward specialises in non-fiction media, with a focus on exploring experimental ways of producing content about radical and labour history. His studio teaching often covers the same terrain, but occasionally wanders into areas like food-based screen media or the growth of online ‘explainer’ videos. Through 2021 his documentary work has been selected for film festivals in Australia, the United States and Canada.
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Luwaytini' by Mark Cleaver, Palawa.
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.