Karin Chien
Karin Chien is a producer, educator and distributor committed to championing independent voices. Karin is the recipient of the inaugural Cinereach Producers Award, the Independent Spirit Producer’s Award and the producer of 10 independent feature-length films. Her films have won over 100 festival awards, premiered at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, been nominated for 4 Independent Spirit Awards and received distribution in over 20 countries. Karin is the founder/president of dGenerate Films, the leading distributor of independent cinema from mainland China. Karin is the co-creator of the Cinema on the Edge screening series, celebrating the best of contemporary Chinese cinema. Karin is the co-founder of i love 2, a production company specializing in socially conscious, short-format content. Karin has consulted for the Sundance Institute, The New York Times, Film Independent, Independent Television Service (ITVS), and Cinereach.
Karin is on the Advisory Board for ArteArchive.
Yasmin Desouki
Yasmin Desouki is a film archivist and programmer with years of film research, archiving, and curatorial experience in Egypt and the US. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she focused on cinema studies and moving image archiving and preservation, and furthered her studies on film restoration practices through the International Federation of Film Archives’ (FIAF) summer School. She previously worked as the artistic director at Cimatheque-Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt from 2013-2019, and prior to that worked as the archive manager at Misr International Films. She has since moved back to the US, and is currently the manager of film collections at the Chicago Film Archives
Kay Dickinson
Coline Houssais
Coline Houssais is a researcher, curator, writer and translator whose
work focuses on culture from the Arab World as well as on the
cultural history of Arab migration in Europe.
Peter Limbrick
Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media. He is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: the Films of Moumen Smihi (University of California Press, 2020) and of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010). He has published articles in Framework, Visual Anthropology, Third Text, Screening the Past, Camera Obscura, and Journal of Visual Culture as well as edited anthologies.
Prof. Limbrick’s first book, Making Settler Cinemas, studies the material and cultural relations of cinema and settler coloniality in the three sites of his title, all of which are embedded in British imperial history and marked by their own distinctive settler colonial politics. His book reveals the ways in which the modes of film production, distribution, reception, and representation in and between those settler societies construct a transnational politics of settler-indigenous encounter. But his book also reveals the possibilities for resisting and reconfiguring those colonial histories through the ongoing work of film archives, indigenous exhibition and guardianship, and even in the labor of film history itself.
Prof. Limbrick’s recent work is on Arab film and video and extends his interest in cinema in colonial and postcolonial environments. His book Arab Modernism as World Cinema, on the Moroccan director Moumen Smihi, a central figure in the New Arab Cinema that took hold in the Maghreb (Northern Africa) in the early 1970s, will be published by the University of California Press in spring, 2020 (an essay from this project has been published in a special issue of the journal Third Text.) As part of this project, he has curated a retrospective of Smihi’s work which has shown at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Block Cinema, Chicago, and the Tate Modern (UK). With Omnia El-Shakry, he organized the symposium Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds at UCSC in 2013. He has published two essays on the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, and continues to research on experimental film and video from North Africa, Syria, and Lebanon.
A related aspect of his research is the relationship between discourses of colonialism, globalization, and sexuality, especially queer or non-normative constructions of gender and sexuality in transnational cinemas.
