Confirmed speakers

​University of South Australia

Deirdre Feeney is a cross-disciplinary artist and lecturer of Contemporary Art at The University of South Australia. Her research interests include the materiality of image making, media archaeology and the history of optics. Deirdre’s practice-based research collaborates across disciplines of physics and engineering to develop optical image systems. Her creative works are hybrid systems incorporating old and new technologies and technological ideas, from Renaissance natural magic to nineteenth-century optical mechanics. With a background in glass-making and the projected moving image, Deirdre uses materials such as glass and mirror to develop image systems that physically and emotionally engage the viewer.

​University of California Los Angeles

Erkki Huhtamo is Professor of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is a world renowned media scholar and a founding figure of media archaeology. He is also a major collector of items related to the early history of visual media. Professor Huhtamo has lectured worldwide, curated exhibitions, directed television programmes, and published widely in over ten languages. His most important book to date is Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (The MIT Press, 2013).

Melissa Ferrari is an experimental animator, nonfiction filmmaker, magic lanternist and educator who seeks to acquaint folklores of the past with contemporary culture. In exposing peripheral histories, she aims to unveil the wonder that lies in the shadow of nonfiction, rather than fiction. Her practice engages with the mythification of science and pseudoscience, the preternatural, and histories of phantasmagoria and documentary.  Melissa also creates commissioned animation for documentaries, specializing in handmade animation for films addressing social issues. Melissa teaches animation courses and workshops, specializing in nonfiction and experimental animation, as well as expanded cinema.  Previously, she was a lecturer at CalArts, Whittier College, Queens College, Cal State LA, and LACHSA, and taught a course in partnership with The Nature Conservancy at CalArts.  Melissa’s research focuses on the ethics and research methodologies of animated nonfiction. As a documentary animator, Melissa's recent commissions include animations for the 2022 feature documentary The Voice of Dust & Ash, and her work has appeared on PBS, the BBC, and CNN.

​Orpheus Institute

​Melissa Van Drie is a cultural historian and performance artist interested in sensory and somatic practices of knowledge production. She works on how sound, hearing and listening are important aspects of worldmaking for both humans and nonhumans. Her PhD (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) explored the intersections of science and theatre in the elaboration of nineteenth-century sound media. Subsequent postdocs and grants in Performance Studies and Music, STS, Media Archeology, and Environmental Humanities permitted further research on the roles and regimes of the senses in histories of art, health, food, and multispecies ecologies (Cambridge, U. Copenhagen, EHESS, CNRS, U. Maastricht). She is currently the first Orpheus Fellow within the new programme Futures in Artistic Research.

​University of Cologne

​Monica van der Haagen-Wulff holds a Doctorate of Creative Arts (DCA) and is an Associate Lecturer at the Chair for Education and Cultural Sociology in the Department of Education and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Cologne. Monica has an intercultural dance and performance background, and her main research focus is on how practice and theory can be merged to create new knowledges, and in so doing decentre Eurocentric knowledge constructions. She is interested in questions of critical heritage, exploring, in particular, the possibilities of embodied ways of understanding, remembering and in the process decolonizing history. By interweaving embodied, affective, and aesthetic methods with critical theory, she aims to find new ways to critically reflect on and make visible both the researcher's own and humanities' involvement and implication in global history.

​St. Francis Xavier University

Rod Bantjes is a Senior Research Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada. He obtained his PhD in sociology from the University of Lancaster in the UK and also has a degree in philosophy.  He has published both academic books and numerous journal articles on environmental social movements and state formation. In 2014, his interests shifted towards media archaeology and its application to understanding changing conceptions of space, perception, and epistemology.  This work has been published in The History of Ideas, Art History, History of Photography, Technology and Culture, Early Popular Visual Culture, and the International Journal of Film and Media Arts.  In 2017, Rod began building and experimenting with optical devices and disseminating his research findings through interactive workshops in addition to traditional academic papers.