Jazlyn Andrews completed her undergraduate degree at Colorado College with a major in Feminist and Gender Studies. She has since done work in retail as well as freelance writing and editing, including for a project called In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, published in 2021. Her interests for graduate school include Black studies, affect theory, and intersectional approaches to the horror genre.
Isa’s work is situated within the transformation and intersection of labor regimes, aesthetic typologies, and developmentalist discourses that constitute the increasing proliferation of digital media infrastructures. Isa is interested in the territorial struggles and social contestations that drive place-based transformations related to media infrastructure, including their concomitant ecological and social outcomes. Her approach to media infrastructure studies builds upon the legacy of conjunctural analysis developed within cultural studies. Isa has publications that include ...
Ziwei Chen is a PhD student in Film and Media Studies at UC Berkeley. He is broadly interested in media theory/historiography, urbanism, and technical infrastructures in the East Asian context. With a background in Computer Science and Media Studies, he is currently interested in exploring the intersection of media and technology studies, particularly the entanglement between media technologies and urbanism in China and elsewhere. He holds a B.S. from Tufts and an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California.
Justine Cheng received her BA from Columbia University and her MPhil from University of Cambridge. She is broadly interested in race, semiotics, and aesthetics. Her current work is focused on the representation of contingency, catastrophe and racial violence. She is also interested in the concept of World and its applications across the discourses of science, philosophy, postcolonial studies, and black studies.
Michael received his BA in African and African Diaspora Studies & Women and Gender Studies from UT Austin. His work seeks to unravel the underlying antagonism between blackness and the psychedelic, focusing on how film and science orient the structure of the psychedelic. Through his engagements with black critical theory, continental philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, he reads for the constitutive lack that blackness must occupy for psychedelic discourses to find and orient their aesthetic projects.
Tommy DePaoli earned a BA in Media Studies from Pomona College in 2013, where he took a particular interest in film history, psychoanalytic film theory, and queer film analysis. Since graduating, Tommy has spent the last ten years working as a digital marketer for film and entertainment. At The Walt Disney Studios, he gained practical knowledge of mass media industries that will inform his main interest in returning to graduate school: ideas of ownership, including the limits and commodification of queer representation in contemporary culture.
Lucas Fink received their BA in Film and Media Studies at UC Berkeley in May of 2023. They are broadly concerned with questions of cinematic / aesthetic excess in the context of black studies, queer theory, and affect theory. During their undergraduate time, Lucas became interested in the problems posed by the digital turn to classical metaphysics, classical cinematic / aesthetic perspectival regimes, and questions of film genre. They hope to extend this line of inquiry in graduate school by continuing to engage the black radical tradition and discourses on melodrama.
Eleanor is a media theorist and artist whose work engages paradigms of efficacy and risk in the media technological landscape, focusing specifically on diagnostics of addiction and the slippages between gambling and gaming. They have worked as a curator, writer, sound designer and editor across the visual and cinematic arts, as well as media and publishing corporations. They hold a BA from Reed College.
