Yasaman Baghban is an Iranian experimental and documentary filmmaker, educator, and film programmer based in the US. She earned her MA in Cinema Studies from Tehran University of Art and graduated with an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University in 2023. Her short films have been showcased at international film festivals such as True/False, Atlanta Film Festival, Female Eye Film Festival, and more.She has served on juries and screening committees for grants and festivals like Cucalorus, The Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival and more. In 2023, she began programming a series called “Nonfiction Series: Essay, Experimental, and Documentary films.

Tristan Bass-Krueger is a PhD student in the Visual and Cultural Studies program, where he takes a special interest in autobiographical film, home movies, and surveillance technologies. He also works as an editor for film and print and as a literary translator, and serves on the editorial board for academic journal InVisible Culture.

Emily Broad is a third year PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies working on the photography of migration, from 1930s California to the contemporary Persian Gulf. She has worked for different photo archives and museums including the Akkasah Center for Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. In her spare time, she works on documentary photography projects and studies Arabic. 

Bridget Fleming is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program. Her interests include feminist film and video, experimental documentary, and performance art. She is an associate curator for the 14th annual Video Art and Experimental Film Festival in New York City, and is organizing special events for the festival’s “Beauty, Sex, & Shame” program. With members of On Film, Bridget is curating a moving-image exhibition about sex work, Sex/Labor, that will open in November 2024 at the Hartnett Gallery. The exhibition is paired with a screening series of independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden’s ‘New York Feminisms Trilogy.’

Danielle Genevro is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in the Visual and Cultural Studies and the George Eastman Museum Fellow AY 2024-2025. She has been a collective programmer for On Film since fall 2022 and was interviewed for the short documentary, Who Controls the Close-Up? (dir. Andres Aya and Sam Peihan Li, 2024). Since spring 2023, she has been the curatorial assistant and web designer for Going Upstate, a decarceration traveling exhibit.

Richard Hooper is a 2nd year Master’s student in the Selznick School of Film & Media Preservation, whose focus is on cinema technologies, spectatorship, and film reception/distribution. Within those frameworks, he writes about the films of East Asia and Latin America, as well as animation and remediation between mediums of expression. A lifelong enthusiast for cinema and the arts, he came to U. Rochester by way of Chicago.

Xuechun Lyu is a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Before coming to U of R, Lyu earned her MA in South Korea. Her research interests include East Asian film and literature; post-war cultural production; and representations of violence and disaster in art and moving images.