Teaching & Mentoring

With a burning desire to share knowledge and skills, my work extends to the curatorial and educational, as a grassroots organizer and workshop leader of the Vancouver super8 festival Project8, post-sound instructor at Simon Fraser University, media arts instructor at the University of British Columbia in the Okanagan, and since 2016 film instructor, creative development advisor and certificate lead at the Catalyst Institute of Creative Arts and Technology (formerly dBs) in Berlin. As an active community member, I served on the board of directors as well as taught video and audio workshops at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, volunteered and taught audio workshops at VIVO Media Arts, and the FilmArche eV self-organized film school, mentored video artists through the Inside Out Film Festival, the Project8 Boot Camp, the CFC’s Venus Video program, xart splitta! eV and Sonntags Club eV, curated independent film screenings, co-founded the Project8 Film Festival, and served as a collective team member for the entzaubert queer DIY uncommercial film festival for 8 years.

Current Research

The work on the Audiofilm project "Reasons to Scream!" brings together 3 strands of research I've been occupied with since beginning to teach film sound at the post-secondary level:

• The hierarchy of the image-sound relationship - ie; "image is king".
  
• Expoitative hierarchies of mainstream feature film production.
  
• Patriarchy in its represenation on-screen.

I'd already been developing a story about queer feminist superhero*ines that fights back against sexual violence when the #metoo movement began in 2017. And felt the chance was now to move ahead with the project. I've had several opportunities to share the research associated with the project. And of course all of teaching includes reearch that I do, but these strands are particularly important to me. Their merging has brought up other strands that excite me, namely the concept of polyvocal storytelling and the question of what happens to the patriarchal 'Gaze' when we remove image from the equation.


PANELS:

• "What is an Audio Film?" Time Lab Symposium, Manifest:io (Berlin, DE) // Feb. 2023
• "Collaborative Filmmaking vs. Toxic Hierarchies" Film School Network (Lucca, IT) // Nov. 2021
  
• "Film education after #metoo" Film School Network (hosted at Lucca, IT, but held online) // Dec. 2020

WORKSHOPS / CLASSES:

• "Non-hierarchal Filmmaking post #metoo" Radical Film Network (Berlin, DE) Aug. 2021
  
• "Films in and around the #metoo movement" Films That Changed Us seminar stream for 2nd year Film Production students at Catalyst (Berlin, DE) 2019-2025
  
• "Audio Storytelling" course for 2nd year Film Production students at Catalyst (Berlin, DE) 2019-2025