We are delighted to announce the participants of the Another Gaze led Critics Workshop at Open City 2023.

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. Together we will cover questions of formal experimentation, ethics, the place of the “I” in criticism, the role of negative criticism, as well as more practical discussion of the editorial process, pitching and interviewing practices.

Another Gaze was founded in 2016 to provide a nuanced forum for discussion about women as filmmakers, filmic subjects, and spectators. In 2021 they launched Another Screen, an irregular streaming platform, streaming short-term programmes of films by women across modes of production and geographies, with new writing and translations about these works. In 2022 they launched a small publishing imprint, Another Gaze Editions.

The critics selected to attend the workshop are listed below:

Johanna Hardt is a curator, most recently at the Heidelberger Kunstverein. She focuses on the intersection of ecology and feminism, with a particular interest in new technologies and sound. She holds an MA in Curating from Goldsmiths College London and a BA in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University Lüneburg. She is an occasional contributor to art magazines. 

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, critic, translator, and scholar whose work focuses on Middle Eastern culture and politics. Her books include Erasing Palestine (Verso, 2023), The Persian Prison Poem (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Writers and Rebels (Yale University Press, 2016). Her writings have appeared in The London Review of Books, Prospect Magazine, Index for Censorship, openDemocracy, The New Arab, and Middle East Eye. She is also editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (Routledge, 2020). She is interested in Iranian road movies and the role of letters in cinema. Born in the US, she has been residing in the UK since 2015. 

Jacqulyn Eunsun is a poet, artist, and educator from Southern California. She works in mediums of text and moving image, reimagining memory through stories found in nature’s flora and fauna. Currently, she lives in New York as an MFA student. 

Sun Park is an artist and cultural worker based in London. She is inspired by improvisation and destruction that challenge the structures of image-making. She writes to engage in diverging conversations, unfinished sentences and poetic translations. Currently, she is interested in trees, lightning and fire. She manages events and marketing at LUX, a moving image arts organisation. 

Chiara Haefliger is a writer and researcher based in London. Her interests lie in moving image work and non-fiction cinema which blurs the boundaries of genre, introducing speculative fiction as a tool to critically re-imagine and think through the archive. She works at Turner Contemporary and Peer Gallery, and is currently studying an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Nambi Kiyira is an editor, writer, cineaste and performer born and based in London where she studied her BA in English Literature at UCL. Taking inspiration from black diasporic intellectual, artistic and cultural sources, her work engages notions of recuperation, defiance and multiplicity through the mediums of film, poetry, dramatic writing and list-making.

Tatum Howey is a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego mostly researching the production of visuality as a constitutive force. 

Leo Stefani is an art historian and PhD Candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is currently wrapping up his thesis, which explores through an intersectional methodology how furniture participated in constructing and fixing different masculinities in the early modern French domestic space. He is also expanding his writing and research practice by developing a podcast entitled Reel Men, which explores the multiplicity of masculine identities in Cinema. He works part-time as a Library Assistant at the Courtauld Library, and has previously been Editorial Assistant for Bloomsbury Academic, and Associate Editor of immediations. 

Tabatha Batra Vaughan is a recent graduate from UCL’s Ethnographic and Documentary Film MA. She is an aspiring filmmaker and writer from London with a special interest in the politics of the city. Tabatha has made films about pirate radio, striking tube workers and urban female nightwalkers that have been shown at the UK Asian Film Festival, Bertha Doc House and Open City. She loves watching and talking about films as much as making them and is looking forward to improving her film writing and criticism skills at the festival. 

Rachel Elizabeth Jones is an artist and writer who grew up in Vermont and lives in Los Angeles. As a writer, she has contributed on art and cinema to publications including Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. As an artist, she is drawn to folk and vernacular modes and uses sculpture, installation, and video to engage with structures of cultural elevation and mythmaking particularly as they pertain to the moving image, as well as complex tensions between urban and rural outlooks. She is a co-editor of tele- magazine and founded the garage art and project space Flower Head in 2020. 

Sula Douglas-Folkes is a film programmer and archive researcher from London. She is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths, which delves into the intersections of Black women’s film, archival reimagination, and curatorial fabulations. Through a triangulated dialogue encompassing her own perspective, Black feminist theory, and temporally diverse artworks, Sula examines the afterlives resonating in ways that envision Black life, bodies, and spaces. 

Monica Fierlafijn Annys (she/they) connects politics and film through research, advocacy and hands-on organising. She’s actively engaged with sex workers’ rights and resistance cinema. 

Image credit (left-to-right, top-to-bottom): Johanna Hardt, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Jacqulyn Eunsun, Sun Park, Chiara Haefliger, Nambi Kiyira, Tatum Howey, Leo Stefani, Tabatha Batra Vaughan, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sula Douglas-Folkes, Monica Fierlafijn Annys