ETMAP PhD candidate Renata Carvalho Baretto presented her paper, “Against Linearity – Zózimo Bulbul and the Brazilian colonial archive,” at the conference Reframing Africa, hosted virtually by the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
She was also a guest lecturer at the University of Oxford Brookes in England, lecturing on “Post-colonial Archives and the role of the British in the Modern Atlantic human trafficking.”
Baretto will present her paper, "From the word to the law – Converging concepts of decoloniality across disciplines," at the NCAIS (Newberry Center for American Indigenous Studies) Graduate Student Conference, to be held virtually from Feb. 2 through 4, 2021.
ETMAP PhD candidate Bentley Brown’s feature-length film, Revolution from Afar, in which Sudanese-American artists are cut off from the 2019 revolution in Sudan, participated virtually in more than 20 film festivals throughout the pandemic, beginning with Visions du Réel and most recently with the British Council's No Direct Flight film series, as well as the ongoing Arab Film Fest Collab. The film was recently acquired by the United Nations International Organization of Migration (IOM) to be screened in its missions around the world and will be making its New York premiere in February as part of the Film at Lincoln Center Virtual Cinema. Revolution from Afar has also been nominated for Best Diaspora Documentary at the Africa Movie Academy Awards.
Brown’s film, First Feature, depicting a team of mostly women making a movie before the legalization of cinema in Saudi Arabia, made its online premiere on Short of the Week, and Brown also served as editor of the Infectious Diseases Society of America's COVID-19 podcast.
Instructor Pat Clark is working with the Niwot Business Association to scan several large sculptures by artist Eddie Running Wolf. The 3D scans will assist in preservation efforts currently underway to save the large tree carvings. The sculptures are currently located in the Niwot Sculpture Park and Outdoor Gallery.
Assistant Professor Erin Espelie's work was screened with the Spectral Film Festival during November and at London’s Deptford Cinema in December. She is helping to host author Robin Wall Kimmerer with Andrew W. Mellon support for a Sawyer Seminar on Environmental Futures. Kimmerer's public talk was held Dec. 8.
Lecturer Keely Kernan is working on a feature length documentary film entitled Under the Valley. The film takes place in the San Luis Valley and explores the depleting Rio Grande aquifer and the struggle to manage the scarcity of water in the West.
Her short film, Of the Basin, screened at the Imagine Science Film Festival, the New Orleans International Film Festival and the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival in the fall of 2020. And her short film, Nibi Walk, which is part of an interactive documentary funded by the Princess Grace Award in film, recently made its film festival rounds and will screen at the Environmental Film Festival Australia in the spring of 2021.
ETMAP PhD candidate Minso Kim’s abstract, "Indoor species and their near future: sensory experiences of the interior architecture," has been accepted to the AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics and Society) conference, which will be held in June.
Her design project, "Ivy Curtain," has been accepted to the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) conference in the category of Main Design Competition. The conference will be held in March.
Lecturer Luiza Parvu recently joined the programming committee of the Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder. A fiction feature film she recently edited, The Salt in Our Waters (directed by Rezwan Shahriar Sumit, Bangladesh-France), is currently on the international festival circuit and played at the Goteborg and Kolkata Film Festivals in January. The film has made appearances in venues including BFI London, Busan and Singapore. Parvu is currently editing Flying Lessons (directed by Elizabeth Nichols), a documentary feature about the intersection of art and housing rights in New York's Lower East Side and the feature film she shot and directed, Ubi Bene Ibi Patria, co-directed by Toma Peiu.
ETMAP PhD candidate and graduate instructor Toma Peiu continues to work on his ethnographic media project on migration between former Soviet Central Asia and Brooklyn, New York, with more outputs to be released in 2021.
Peiu, in collaboration with Luiza Parvu, will present during the panel Encountering Reality as Crisis: Documentary, Ethnographic Media and Education at the upcoming RAI Film Festival and Conference, Creative Engagement with Crisis, to be held remotely between March 19-28. Peiu and Parvu’s photo series, Space Flows, will be featured in the online exhibition Three River Histories: Naryn-Syr Darya, organized by the University of Tubingen's Department of Anthropology in collaboration with local partners in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Associate Professor Roshanna Sylvester gave several presentations at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Annual Convention in November. As part of a roundtable on “Technological and Scientific Vestiges of Socialism: Infrastructure, Institutions and Cultural/Educational Programs Across the 1989/1991 Divide,” she discussed the STEM gender gap in the former Soviet Union, looking specifically at generational differences following the collapse of communism. She also participated in a lively roundtable, “Rebellious Archives: Anxieties and Opportunities,” which explored the creative possibilities and limitations of working with (and relying on) digital facsimiles.
ETMAP PhD candidate Josh Westerman was selected as a post-doctoral fellow to collaborate on public art and engagement with Professor Tyler Kelly at the University of Birmingham UK in the field of mirror symmetry and pure maths. The post-doc is part of a the UK Future Leaders and Innovation Grant and will begin in 2022.
Lecturer and ETMAP certificate holder Sean Winters is working with Reality Garage on a project for the Colorado Music Festival. He recorded and produced ambisonic audio for an ongoing series of XR experiences featuring the renowned Takács string quartet performing at the Chautauqua auditorium, and the first production, an immersive VR experience, was publicized as the official opening night event of DCMP’s first ever virtual music festival.
Lecturer Rebecca Zinner's (MCritMedia'18) short film, I Was Expecting More Fires, recently premiered at the Horsetooth International Film Festival. A departure from her usual documentary work, this piece revisits her childhood anxiety around a potential house fire through live action narrative, animation and hand-processed 16mm film. She is also screening films for the 2021 Boulder International Film Festival as a second-year member of the Festival's Selection Committee.
Zinner is looking forward to continuing research for her next film––a documentary about bias in medicine and how it negatively impacts patients––and hosted more Sporadic Chat events for DCMP during winter break.