Programs

Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.

Responding to our 2024-25 programming theme of “Absent Here, Present There”, LaRochelle has been further developing their ongoing project QT.bot - an artificial intelligence, trained on the dataset of the community mapping platform Queering the Map that generates speculative queer and trans narratives and images of the environments in which they might occur. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.LaRochelle’s residency will culminate in an onsite exhibition at the Coach House in September, consisting of a new speculative documentary film produced with QT.bot material, presented within a multi media installation.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics(Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a coauthor of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Excerpts from a book-in-progress on climate action, liberal sensemaking, and the "world" concept have appeared in Critical Inquiry and are forthcoming in Representations.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor, and works as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of History. Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. Articles have appeared in American Imago, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Technology and Culture, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new popular magazine for psychoanalysis on the left.

Dr. Kris Paulsen is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. Her work explores the intersections of art and engineering, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, and Artificial Intelligence. She is the author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and essays on contemporary art and new media. Her writing has appeared in publications such as October, Representations, Media-N, Signs and Society, BOMB, Mousse, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and X-TRA, and in exhibition catalogues for Zach Blas, Sarah Rosalena, Ann Hamilton, and Katherine Behar, among others.

Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries and the materiality of sexual media. He has published on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of technology, labor, archives, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and metadata. His writing has appeared in Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Journal of Documentation; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021), and elsewhere. He is editor of Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); and the forthcoming Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025), among others.

Lauren McLeod Cramer is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the aesthetics of blackness and popular culture. She is currently writing a book on hip-hop, architecture, and black spatial practice. Lauren is a founding member of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics, and is the co-Editor of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Black Scholar,Black Camera, Film Criticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Andy Lee is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute and a graduate research fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology. Her research focuses broadly on new media and the history of computation, with a theoretical focus on spatiality and embodiment in video games. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between the United States military and the video game industry, analyzing how military simulation games articulate logics of spatial simulation that are inherited from their origins as military training software.

Cole Armitage is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies. His dissertation explores the development of the VTuber (Virtual YouTuber) phenomenon from a kind of technologically novel character performance into a distinct subculture from 2016 to present, centered in Japan but disseminated worldwide and popularized on video and livestream-sharing platforms like YouTube and Twitch. The first chapter of Cole’s dissertation explores how the perceptible traces of mediation in VTubing come into tension with the goal of prolonging an experience of interacting with characters made “virtual” by their lack of a unitary real-world referent.

Mynt Marsellus is PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Their dissertation project argues for a new approach to authorship in cinema studies by staging an encounter between recent work in film philosophy, particularly concerning the works of Stanley Cavell, and classical auteurist writings.

Cate Cleo Alexander (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Prior to U of T, Cate obtained a BA Combined Honours in History and Classics and a MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation examines digital history content creation in order to establish a better understanding of how social media platforms and content creators influence cultural memory. When she is not studying cultural heritage, digital humanities, or media theory, Cate can be found social dancing or watching old movies at The Revue.