Biographical Notes

Richard Allen is chair professor of film and media art and dean of the School of Creative Media at City University, Hong Kong. He has published widely on film theory, aesthetics, and poetics. His book, Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories, edited with Ira Bhaskar, will be published by Intellect and Orient Blackswan early next year. He recently curated the exhibition Art Machines: Past and Present at City University exhibition gallery (catalogue: City University Press).

Roy Anker is professor emeritus of English at Calvin University. His most recent book is Beautiful Light: Religious Meaning in Film (2017).

Jamie Chambers is a lecturer in film and television at Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh). Alongside his research into the global possibilities of a folk cinema he is an award-winning film director, having made a series of films about community folk cultures in Scotland including When the Song Dies (2013) and Blackbird (2014). He is the founder and curator of the Folk Film Gathering (folkfilmgathering.com), the world's first film festival of folk cinema.

Paul Cooke is centenary chair of world cinemas at the University of Leeds and has published widely on the cultural politics of contemporary film. He is currently the Principal Investigator on Changing the Story: Building Civil Society with and for Young People in Post Conflict Settings, a project looking at the ways in which heritage and arts organizations can help young people to shape civil society in post-conflict countries. He is also co-lead of "Community Engagement for AMR" at the University of Leeds, a project that seeks to use participatory practices to unlock community-level knowledge in order to overcome antimicrobial resistance, one of the largest public health issues we face as a planet. He has also run numerous advocacy-focused participatory video projects, working with communities in the United Kingdom, Germany, Kenya, Nepal, Cambodia, India, and Colombia.

Jared Del Rosso is an associate professor in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver. He researches and teaches on denial, with a specific focus on the collective denial of torture. His work in this area has been published in Social Forces, Sociological Forum, and Social Problems. He also published a book on the denial of torture, Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate, with Columbia University Press. He is currently writing a new book on the sociology of denial, which is under contract with New York University Press.

John Nguyet Erni is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. He is an elected fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, and an elected corresponding fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2017-2018, Erni served as president of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. A recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, Lincoln, and Annenberg research fellowships, and many other awards and grants, Erni's wide-ranging work traverses international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth consumption culture in Hong Kong and Asia, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of 9 academic titles, most recently Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (2019), and Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (2017).

Ann Hardy is a senior lecturer in the screen and media studies Program at Waikato University, Hamilton, whose research explores how intersections between media, religion, and culture are creating new identities in contemporary New Zealand. From 2016 to 2019 Hardy was an investigator on the Royal Society's Marsden Fund Project Te Maurea Whiritoi: the sky as a cultural resource - Maori astronomy, ritual and ecological knowledge, outputs from which included curating a section of the Te Whaanau Maarama (Family of Light) exhibition on the recent resurgence of the indigenous celebrations of the rising of the Matariki constellation in winter. She also has an interest in audiences for popular culture and was one of four authors of the 2017 volume Fans, Blockbusterization and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire: Global Receptions of the Hobbit Film Trilogy (Palgrave Macmillan).

Mette Hjort is chair professor of humanities and dean of arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, affiliate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, and visiting professor of cultural industries at the University of South Wales. Hjort holds an honorary doctorate in transnational cinema studies from the University of Aalborg and has served on the board of the Danish Film Institute (appointed by the Danish Ministry of Culture). Her current research focuses on moving images as they relate to public value in the context of health and well-being.

Pietari Kääpä is a reader in media and communications at University of Warwick. He is a specialist in environmental screen media, focusing especially on environmental media production, policies, practices, and content (especially film and television). He has published widely in the field, including Environmental Management of the Media (Routledge 2018) and Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas (Bloomsbury 2014). He also works on media industry studies, especially in relation to Nordic film and television. Publications include The Politics of Nordsploitation (with Tommy Gustafsson, Bloomsbury 2021) and Nordic Genre Film (with Tommy Gustafsson, Edinburgh University Press 2015). He is an editor of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema and a docent (affiliate professor) in film and television studies at the University of Helsinki. He is principal investigator (with Hunter Vaughan) of the AHRC Network on Global Green Media Production (https://globalgreenmedianetwork. com/).

Paisley Livingston (BA, philosophy, Stanford University, PhD The Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University) is professor emeritus of philosophy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He taught previously at the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, and McGill University. He has published various papers and books in aesthetics, including Art and Intention (Oxford University Press 2005), "History of the Ontology of Art" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman (Oxford University Press 2009).

Anne Ahn Lund is co-founder of Jordnær Creative and Nordic Eco Media Alliance (NEMA). She is teaching creative sustainability in the Nordic countries, has trained production assistants and runners in sustainable practices, and has presented recommendations directly to the Danish Minister of Culture. Lund is a filmmaker and has taught film production practices at University of Copenhagen and The Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She holds an MA in film studies with a focus on embodied aesthetics.

Josefine Madsen founded Jordnær Creative in 2017 to fight for climate action and social justice in the creative industries. She has put the climate footprint of the cultural sector on the Danish public agenda with appearances and press coverage in national radio as well as news media. Madsen is also a co-founding member of Nordic Eco Media Alliance (NEMA). She holds a BA and an MA in film and media studies from the University of Copenhagen, and specialized in sustainable film and TV production as the first Danish student to do so. Furthermore, Madsen has worked with documentaries and film financing.

Ruth McElroy is professor of creative industries and faculty head of research at the University of South Wales. She is co-director with professor Lisa Lewis of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations. In public life, McElroy is chair of Ffilm Cymru Wales and a member of Ofcom's Advisory Committee Wales. She helps inform media policy through her membership of the Institute of Welsh Affair's Media Policy Group. McElroy's main research interests are in film and TV studies, media policy and cultural identity with a particular interest in minority-language media.

Dooley Murphy is an audiovisual media researcher poised to receive his PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Communication. His recently-completed doctoral thesis addresses the form and function of interactive virtual reality (VR) artworks from a cognitive-analytic perspective, with a particular focus on manifestations of narrative. He has published on video game player and VR participant experience, the structure and process of audiovisual narration, and design strategies in interactive storytelling. His next avenue of research will likely be avatars, characters, and virtual embodiment. In his spare time, he likes to make media art about the wonderful mundanity of technology and culture.

Ted Nannicelli teaches at the University of Queensland. His most recent books are Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Truth in Visual Media: Aesthetics, Ethics Politics (co-edited with Marguerite La Caze, Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He is the editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.

Dr. Caitriona Noonan is senior lecturer in media and communication in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. She is an active researcher in the areas of film and television...