Speakers
Maaike Bleeker
Maaike Bleeker’s research focuses on processes of perception and meaning-making in performance, dance, theatre and the arts, as well as in science and in public life. She combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory and cognitive science. She has just finished a book manuscript about movement, media and embodied thinking (Corporeal Literacy: Movement. Media and Thinking (in) Motion) and is preparing work on contemporary dramaturgy (together with dramaturge Janine Brogt), resistance to representation (about among others the work of Rabih Mroué, Hotel Modern and Milo Rau), and posthuman approaches to knowledge transmission. She was a partner in the international research project New Media Dramaturgies and is currently an international partner in research projects about Social Robotics, Spectacular Astronomy, posthuman performativity (Rock-Body), digital archiving of artistic work, and artistic creation processes. Her monograph Visuality in the Theatre was published by Palgrave (2008).
Geert-Jan Bogaerts
Geert-Jan Bogaerts heads the department of digital media of Dutch broadcaster VPRO where he is responsible for digital channels, innovation and distribution strategy. He is also a member of the VPRO management team and an entrepreneur with his new media consultancy named Raker. Before that he worked as a journalist and editor at De Volkskrant (15+ years of experience in financial reporting and international political and economic affairs), and he has lectured at the University of Groningen.
Jay Bolter
Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), co-authored with Richard Grusin, is one of the most influential publications on media in transition. Bolter specializes in digital media, augmented reality and mixed media. At the Georgia Institute of Technology he collaborates with researchers in the Augmented Environments Lab to create apps for cultural heritage, education and entertainment purposes.
Giovanna Fossati
Giovanna Fossati is Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam where she has taught in the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Program since it was established, in 2003. She is also the Chief Curator at EYE Filmmuseum where she supervises a collection of 50,000 titles. She is currently leading the research project The Sensory Moving Image Archive (SEMIA). Boosting Creative Reuse for Artistic Practice and Research. Fossati is the author of From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (2009 and 2011), co-author with Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015), and co-editor with Annie van den Oever of Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory (2016). She is currently working on a revised version of From Grain to Pixel (forthcoming in 2018).
Erkki Huhtamo
Erkki Huhtamo is Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Departments of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media. He is a renowned media historian and theorist and one of the founders of media archaeology as an approach to media in transition. Beside his scholarly work, Huhtamo has also curated numerous exhibitions in Europe, the US and Australia. His many publications include the co-edited Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011) and the monograph Illusions in Motion (2013).
Jennifer Holt
Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specializes in the areas of media industry studies, policy and regulation and digital media. Her current research explores digital distribution and policies related to cloud storage and digital media infrastructure. Holt is the author of Empires of Entertainment (2011) which examines deregulation and media conglomeration from the Reagan era through the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. She is the former Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project – a multi-year collaboration with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Jenkins is one of the most influential scholars in the field of emerging and digital media, specializing in fan culture, transmedia storytelling and participatory culture. His most renowned books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008) and the co-edited Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (2013). Together with William Uricchio Jenkins co-founded the Comparative Media Program at MIT and initiated the bi-annual Media in Transition conferences. He is part of the Convergence Culture Consortium, a network that bridges academics and the media industry and rethinks the relation to consumers in the age of participatory culture.
John Leek
John Leek studied at the Teacher Training Institute at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and also pursued Educational Sciences (instructional design, media didactics) at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated on “Nintendo Kids” in 1994. He co-developed the national science and technology center NEMO (1994-2000). Today Leek is manager of creative industries and media at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision where he is also responsible for the educational strategy. He was one of the founders of the national network media literacy Mediawijzer.net and still is a core member of the team there. Currently he is developing the new institute and museum for media culture of Sound and Vision (opening in 2020).
Amanda D. Lotz
Amanda D. Lotz is a Professor Media Studies at the University of Michigan and Fellow at the Peabody Media Center. She is the author of several books on US television, specifically the industrial shifts since the end of the network era, and on representations of gender on television and in the media. Her most recent book Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (2017) explores internet-distributed services such as Netflix and how their business strategies and revenue models differ. She is a well-known speaker at media organizations (NBC, IFC, Detroit Public Television, Samsung, Google, the Estonian National Public Broadcasting Council, Warner Bros., Red Line Editorial etc.).
Vicki Mayer
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane University (New Orleans). In her research she focuses on media production and consumption in relation to economic and political transformations in the media industries. She is the author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (2011) and the recently published Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy (2017). Mayer is the editor of the journal Television and New Media and the director of the online project ViaNolaVie on New Orleans’ history and culture bringing together community voices, educational institutions and citizen journalists.
Eleonora M. Mazzoli
Eleonora M. Mazzoli joined the European Affairs Department of EBU in 2016, and since 2017, she is also European Affairs Advisor for RAI. She works on media policy, overseeing the developments of relevant EU regulatory framework and initiatives, with a focus on media research & innovation, platforms and cultural diversity. In 2016, she was interim project manager of the EBU Big Data initiative, while currently she is member of the Steering Committee of MediaRoad, an EU-funded project aimed at developing a European media ecosystem for innovation. Eleonora Mazzoli’s background is firmly in the interdisciplinary subjects of media economics and media policy. She holds a BA in Economics and Management of Arts, Culture and Communication from L. Bocconi University (cum laude) and a Research Master in Media and Performance studies from Utrecht University (magna cum laude), during which she specialized on the political economy of online television.
Lisa Parks
Lisa Parks is Professor at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She previously worked at UC Santa Barbara where she chaired the Department of Film and Media Studies and served as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Her research focuses on three areas: satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. Parks is the author of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015) and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She has also co-edited Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017).
Roberta Pearson
Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham, UK, where her teaching and research encompass a wide variety of topics. She has developed a particular interest in the the scheduling, marketing and distribution of American television drama in the UK, fan studies and transmedia storytelling. Pearson co-edited Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Screen Narrative Contexts (2015), a collection of essays connecting industrial conditions of production to the way stories are told across a range of media.
Lynn Spigel is the Frances Willard Professor of Screen Cultures at the School of Communication at Northwestern University (Chicago) and was a Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. She is an eminent television historian and the author of several books about popular media and post-war culture. Spigel also co-edited the seminal Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (2014) which addressed the future of television in the post-network era. In her current research project she examines smart homes and digital technologies, with a focus on gender, technology, and media’s relation to everyday life.
William Uricchio
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University. At Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture, William initiated and developed teaching and research on the relationship between “old” and “new” media. At MIT he co-founded and directed the Comparative Media Studies program. William was Principal Investigator of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and continues in that role with its successor, the MIT Game Lab. He is the founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and has frequently collaborated with the International Dutch Documentary Festival IDFA. His scholarly research considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices in relation to the (re-) construction of representation, knowledge and publics. His current research focuses on forms of augmented reality and the cultural use of algorithms. His publications include Many More Lives of the Batman (2015), We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identity (2008), and Media Cultures (2006).