WSS Online Bios
Enrique Moreno Ceballos is director of Mexico Silent Film Festival. A film curator dedicated to teaching, programming, and researching silent cinema, s/he specializes in gender studies and coordinates cinematographic activities for the National Preservation Center of the Railroad Cultural Heritage (Ministry of Culture) and Alliançe Française de Puebla.
Jin Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the school of creative media of City University of Hong Kong.
Michelle Miao Chen is a well-known film director of China New Cinema. A graduate of Beijing Film Academy, she went to study in US and work in Fox Worldwide, before returning to China to apply her Western experience to filmmaking. Her feature film Son of the Stars won the Best Upcoming Director’s Award at China American Film Festival, won the Best Humanity Award at Beijing Youth Film Festival, won the Best Young Writer/Director Award, etc. Her first feature film Mi Ni was theatrically released nationwide in greater China. A Girl Thirteen was entered into the 60th Cannes Film Festival for the Junior Competition and won Best Digital Film at the Beijing Youth Film Festival. She is a seasoned documentary filmmaker. Her recent documentary Daughter of Shanghai was thertrically released in Mainland China. The Snake Boy, Shanghai Dreams, and Lulu and Me have been critically acclaimed at various international film festivals and have been broadcasted by TV channels throughout China and Asia. Michelle Miao Chen is the founder of “Temperature Movie”, a multiple media platform providing digital contents for Internet, WeChat, and Digital TV.
Somayeh (Nasim) Ghazizadeh holds an M.A. in English Literature from Tehran University and has 20 years of experience as journalist and critic of Iranian Cinema. She has taught English for art students in universities in Tehran and was also Head of International News in Fajir Film Festival for many years, among other festivals. She has spoken at many international conferences related to women cinema like NYC Stony Brooks (2014), Roma Tre University (2019–2013), London SOAS University (2011), and many others. She has also written three books.
Dr. Qin Li, Director of the National Communication Strategy Research Center, Professor at School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. A Graduate of the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she was the winner of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ College Award (an Emmy Award). She is among the few pioneer scholars worldwide to study immersive communication. Her other research fields are global communication and international politics, and new media and social change. Her famous publications include Immersive Communication: The Communication Paradigm of the Third Media Age (2013, 2020) and Bing Media: The Theory and Practice of Immersive Communication (2019). She has served as a reporter and editor for the People’s Daily, and as an executive producer and host for the television talk show “In the Spotlight with Qin” on Time Warner Cable in the US. She is also the founder of Beijing inDEPTH Media.
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema (2020), Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies (2019), among others.
Xiaoyang Pan, a second-year master student from Columbia University School of the Arts. She works at the intersection of Film and Media Studies, Critical Theory and Chinese history in the contemporary background. She is a keen writer and documentary filmmaker as well.
Mina Radovic is a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies and German from the University of St Andrews. A FIAF-trained archivist, curator, filmmaker, and historian, he runs Liberating Cinema, a non-profit organisation committed to the representation, restoration, and exhibition of world cinema heritage. His research interests are in film history and historiography, archiving and restoration, Serbian cinema, Yugoslav cinema, early cinema and culture, and the study of language and ideology.
Christopher Rea is Professor of Chinese and Associate Head (External), UBC Department of Asian Studies; author of Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 (Columbia, 2021); creator of the Chinese Film Classics Project (chinesefilmclassics.org), the largest free collection of early Chinese films with English subtitles.
Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). She is completing a monograph on Anna May Wong, the best-known early 20th-c. Chinese American screen-stage performer.
Dr. April Gailan Wei is an assistant professor of Cinema and Television Programme at Beijing Normal University – Hong Kong Baptist University United International College. Her studies mainly involve narrative art, transmedia storytelling, gender and politics in filmmaking, film history, and documentary studies.
Jingrui Yan is an M.A. student at the School of Arts, Peking University. Her research interests include Chinese film history, media archaeology, and gender studies.
Ailin Zhou has earned her M.A. degree in Film & Media Studies at the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her major research interest is in Chinese film history, especially that of the 1930s and the early PRC, and also the history of Hong Kong cinema. She is now working on a project about cinema and socialist feminism in the Maoist era.