We are delighted to announce the participants of the Another Gaze led Critics Workshop at Open City 2022. 

The Critics Workshop is an immersive six-day programme developed by the Another Gaze editorial team to discuss the methodologies and practice of a politically engaged film criticism. The workshops will interrogate questions around the purpose of criticism, editing/the editor, formal experimentation, critical ethics, and the place of the “I” in criticism. 

It will run from the 8th to the 13th September and will be hosted by Daniella Shreir (co-editor and founder of Another Gaze). Guest speakers include Missouri Williams, Georgie Carr, Laura Staab, Morgan Quaintance, Elena Gorfinkel, Alice Spawls, Rebecca Liu, Simran Hans, and Caitlín Doherty. 

Another Gaze is a online and printed journal founded in 2016 to provide a forum for nuanced discussion about women as filmmakers, film subjects and spectators. In 2021 they launched Another Screen: an irregular streaming platform, showcasing ephemeral programmes of films by women across modes of production and geographies, with new writing and translations about these works. This winter, they will launch a small publishing house, Another Gaze Editions, with two books, by Lorenza Mazzetti and Marguerite Duras.

Travel bursaries for international participants were made possible thanks to a microgrant from the International Documentary Association.

The critics selected to attend the workshop are listed below: 

Amina Ali is a writer and archivist, who is primarily interested in exploring (hi)stories of the Black diaspora. 

Beth Bramich is a writer and researcher. She is currently developing a PhD project in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London on feminist film collectives. Beth has contributed to Art Monthly, Frieze and Afterall Online, and regularly collaborates with artists on films, exhibitions, events and publications, most recently with Flatness on Queer Diasporic Futurity (2022) and with Frances Scott on Incantation, Wendy (2021). She teaches on art programmes at the University of the Arts London, is a member of the research network Group Work: Contemporary Art and Feminism, part of the working group of the Feminist Duration Reading Group, and is a cultural tenant with Flatness at Studio Voltaire. 

Gianni Esporas is an artist and researcher based in Scotland. Her creative practice explores female labour, inspecting those themes through the material of hair. She has previously worked at Lux Scotland and has been a visiting lecturer for Gray’s School of Art. 

Hannah Bonner is a current creative nonfiction MFA student at the University of Iowa. She has an MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and a BA in English & Creative Writing from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her essays have been featured, or are forthcoming, in Bright Wall/Dark Room, Bustle, Essay Daily, The Little Patuxent Review, The Rumpus, and VIDA. Her academic publications include “Performing Archives in the Present: Exploring Feminist Performance Art, The Politics of (In)Visibility, and the Archive in #MeToo and #TimesUp” in South Central Review and “Social Media as Authorship and Selfveillance in Girls” in Routledge.  

Ina Hagen (b.1989, NO) is an artist and critic based in Oslo and working across written and spoken text, performance, pedagogy, video, and communal making practices. Hagen is a semi-regular contributor to the Nordic journal on art and criticism, Kunstkritikk (2016-). She holds a BFA from Oslo Academy of Fine Art, attended Maumaus Independent Study Program, Lisbon (2021), and has been awarded a series of practice grants and research residencies, among them IASPIS, Stockholm (2019-20) and Capacete, Rio de Janeiro (2018). Alongside her studio practice, Hagen is a working board member of the young artist’s membership organisation, union, and contemporary art institution UKS/Young Artist’s Society (2017-), a founding board member of Kunstnerboligforeningen/The Artist Housing Association (2020), and an Editorial Research Group member to MARCH Journal of Art and Strategy. From 2016-2020, she co-founded and ran the discursive platform and exhibition venue ‘Louise Dany’ in Oslo. In 2022, Hagen is working with Kunstnerboligforeningen on the public art commission Selvbyggeren (KORO Public Art Norway and the Oslo Municipal Art Collection), that addresses artists’ living and working conditions in urban centres. 

Leena Habiballa is a writer and film student at the Other Cinemas Film School. She holds a PhD in the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Ageing from Newcastle University and the Mayo Clinic. Her essays have previously appeared in the Danish Film Institute, Tropics of Meta, Media Diversified, and The Third Rail. 

Maria Paradinas is an archive researcher and film programmer from London. She is particularly interested in the politics of archival practice as it relates to histories that have been destroyed, mis-recorded or obscured. Maria is a Pre-Selector for London Short Film Festival, and has previously programmed film events at the Barbican as part of Young Programmers and Emerging Film Curators. She is currently a juror for the FOCAL International awards. 

Nivedita Nair is a PhD student in film studies, specialising in contemporary Marxist aesthetics. Born and raised in Mumbai, film has always been a gateway for her to understand the culture and politics of a changing India. Hence, moving to London became an opportunity to encounter newer ways of seeing film as a form of resistance for people from all across the world. She is compelled by theory that contextualises film practices in contemporary aesthetics and culture, and film practices that complicate our understanding of said theory. She loves terrible CGI explosions, campy dream sequences, and fake blood as much as she loves long static shots, crisp diegetic sound, and archive footage. 

Olachi Nwuke is a recent graduate from Cornell University with a major in Industrial & Labor Relations and minors in Law & Society; Inequality Studies; Film. She enjoys watching and learning about film, listening to people, and driving. Writing is very important to her, and her hope is to do it more and more and to grow as a writer. 

Rebecca Jane Arthur is a visual artist working predominantly with moving image and text. She is co-founder of the Brussels-based, artist-run production and distribution platform elephy, contributor to the online film criticism platform Sabzian, and will begin a PhD in the Arts at KASK & Conservatorium/School of Arts Ghent in autumn 2022. Parallel to her artistic practice, Arthur worked at Auguste Orts as coordinator of the Creative Europe-funded AMI project On & For Production and Distribution 2018-2021 and currently coordinates the audiovisual productions at ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts, both in Brussels. 

Ruby Mastrodimos is a New Jersey-born, London-based filmmaker and writer. Her work explores questions of class, feminized labor, physical ritual, as well as the space that the supernatural inhabits in our daily lives and imaginations. She is currently working on her thesis film for her MA in Filmmaking from the London Film School. 

Image credit (clockwise from top left): Beth Bramich, Nivedita Nair, Ina Hagen, Ruby Mastrodimos, Maria Paradinas, Amina Ali, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Leena Habiballa, Olachi Nwuke, Gianni Esporas, Hannah Bonner.