SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS

Principal Organizers are Irene Gustafson and Aparna Sharma in conjunction with representatives from Aalto University in Helsinki, The Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR) at UCSC, and a University of California Advisory Board.

The symposium is made possible by funding from Porter College Festival Funding. Co-sponsored by The UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR) with additional support from The Arts Division Events Office,  the Department of Film and Digital Media, and Porter College/Film and Digital Media Visiting Artist Series.

IRENE GUSTAFSON 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 Camera Obscura, The Journal of Visual Culture, The Moving Image, and Spectator.  Her work, both audiovisual and written, explores a discrete set of interests: essayistic modes of production; the found, lost, neglected object or seemingly invisible object as cultural artifact; historiographies of the everyday and the recent past; non-fiction media production, history and theory; and questions of identity, visual style, gender and sexuality.

APARNA SHARMA is a documentary filmmaker and theorist. She works as Assistant Professor at the Dept. of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA. Her films document narratives that are overlooked in the mainstream imagination of the Indian nation. She has focused on Indian diasporas and the widows of Vrindavan previously. She is presently working in India’s northeastern region where she has completed a documentary on the Kamakhya Temple and where she is now documenting a tribal women’s weaving workshop associated with Mahatma Gandhi. Aparna Sharma’s films combine techniques of observational cinema with montage practice. As a film theorist she is committed to writing about cinema practices that fall outside the normative narratives of mainstream Hindi cinema. She has previously written on Indo-Pak ties through documentary and the representation of gender in Indian cinema. Presently she is working on a book manuscript that explores non-canonical documentary practices from the Indian subcontinent.

 

 

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