Open City Award, Emerging Filmmaker Award
Matthew Barrington
Matthew Barrington is a researcher and curator based in London. He is currently working on his PhD at Birkbeck College, London which focuses on Slow Cinema. He is the Manager of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and a programmer for the Essay Film Festival and the London Korean Film Festival. In addition to these positions he is a curator of cinema at the Barbican Centre.
Hyun Jin Cho
Hyun Jin Cho is a film curator based in London where she is Programmer for the BFI London Film Festival. She has previously worked for the London Korean Film Festival and Curzon Artificial Eye. Her recent curated projects have been presented at cultural institutions and film festivals such as Tate, ICA, REDCAT and Il Cinema Ritrovato. She is currently undertaking research on the intersection of colonial history and the culture of cinema.
Elena Gorfinkel
Elena Gorfinkel is a film scholar and critic. She writes about independent, underground, experimental film, contemporary global cinema and artist’s films, and women’s film histories. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017), and co-editor of the volumes Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (2011) and Global Cinema Networks (2019). She is currently writing a book on cinemas of exhaustion (awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant) and a monograph about Barbara Loden’s Wanda. Her criticism appears in Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, Cinemascope, and other publications. She is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London
Lucy Parker
Lucy Parker is a filmmaker and educator. She was the recipient of the IDFA First Appearance prize in 2019 for her film Solidarity which premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and in London at Open City. Solidarity is about the experiences of workers in the UK who were blacklisted alongside women who were tricked into intimate relationships with undercover police. She is currently participating in IDFA Project Space 2021 developing a film about the current Undercover Policing Inquiry. Her films are distributed by LUX, London.
Sonali Joshi
Sonali Joshi is a curator, access specialist and subtitler, and Founder/Director of Day for Night and Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival. Her interests cover Asian cinema, Latin American cinema, and architecture and cinema. Sonali holds a PhD in Cinema Studies (University of Glasgow). She founded Day for Night with the aim of enabling broader access to underrepresented areas of cinema through curatorial projects, specialist distribution and access (subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing and foreign languages; audio-description).
UK Short Film Award, International Short Film Award
Maeve Brennan
Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. She is the current Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow (2019-22) and is participating in British Art Show 9 (2021-22). Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID. Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013-14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.
Qila Gill
Qila Gill is a film programmer and producer. Currently the International Programmer at London Short Film Festival (LSFF) and part of the selection committee at Sheffield DocFest. Previously she programmed for London Film Festival (LFF) and Aesthetica Film Festival. She is a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a member of BGDM, POC2, an alumnus of IFFR Sessions, and runs Marginalia Pictures.
Clive James Nwonka
Dr Clive Nwonka is a Lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York and incoming Lecturer in Film, Culture and Society at University College London. His work is interested in the relationship between film, Blackness and social space, Black film and literature and racial inequality in the UK film industry. He is the Co-editor of the book Black Film British Cinema II and the author of the forthcoming book Black Boys: The Aesthetics of British Urban Film.
Adam Pugh
Adam Pugh is a curator, writer and designer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he also works as Regional Director, NE Contemporary Visual Arts Network. He previously ran the artists’ moving image programme Projections at Tyneside Cinema. He contributes regularly to Art Monthly; and has taught, delivered talks and served on international juries for institutions and events worldwide.
Róisín Tapponi
Róisín Tapponi is a film curator, programmer and writer based in London. She is Founder of Habibi Collective, Founder CEO of Shasha Movies and Founder EIC of ART WORK Magazine. Tapponi has most recently curated moving-image exhibition programmes at MoMA, MAAT Lisbon and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has delivered masterclasses at Locarno Film Festival and CPH:DOX; and has lectured on women’s essay film and decolonial archiving at Oxford University, UC Berkeley and more. Tapponi is a contributing writer at frieze; she has recently been awarded the World-Leading PhD Scholarship in Art History hosted by St Andrews, and is contributing to the catalogue for this year’s Venice Biennale.