Principal Organizers are Irene Gustafson, Irene Lusztig, and Hannah Jayanti. This year’s symposium is made possible by funding from Porter College, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, and the UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR).

Irene Lusztig (www.komsomolfilms.com) is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, and educator.  Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Her four feature length films have been screened around the world. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Professor of Film and Digital Media.

Irene Gustafson (www.irenegustafson.com) is a documentary filmmaker and writer. She works as Associate Professor at the Department of Film and Digital Media, UCSC. Her films and videos have screened nationally and internationally and her writing has appeared in [in]Transition, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Visual Culture, The Moving Image, Cinema Journal Dossier and Spectator. Her work, both audiovisual and written, explores a discrete set of interests: essayistic modes of production; non-fiction media production, history and theory; and questions of identity, visual style, gender and sexuality.

Hannah Jayanti (www.hannahjayanti.com) is a documentary filmmaker and organizer whose work spans films, performances, installations, and community projects. Through a collaborative process these combine documentary with emerging technologies alongside social practices. Her work has been supported by Sundance Institute, Sandbox Films, Tribeca Film Institute, Catapult, Points North Institute, New York Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, among others, and exhibitions include Rotterdam, Sheffield, Dok Leipzig, Tribeca, Transmediale,  Smithsonian, Museum of the Moving Image, New Yorker Festival. She is a PhD candidate at U.C. Santa Cruz focusing on speculative documentaries, spatial knowledge practices, multi-format storytelling, and ethical collaborative practices.