To contact us, please email: WaysOfDoingCollective[at]gmail.com
Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St Andrews)
Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Texture in film (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of Television performance (Red Globe Press, 2019) and is currently working on videographic projects relating to design work in film and television. She was one of the co-organisers of Embodying the Video Essay workshop, hosted at Bowdoin College in 2022. She has published audiovisual essays exploring the colour design of George Hoyningen-Huene and contributed to Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary and Ian Garwood’s collaborative Indy Vinyl for the Masses. Her work has been featured in the Sight & Sound Best of Video Essays of 2022 and 2023, and received an honorable mention in the BAFTSS practice research awards 2022. She can be found on Vimeo.
Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia)
Dr. Colleen Laird is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Cinema in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). She has published in In[Transition]: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies,Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, Frames Cinema Journal, and Jump Cut. Three of her video essays were included in the Sight and Sound “Best Video Essays of 2022.” She was the PI for a 2023 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection (SSHRC) Grant for the “Embodying the Video Essay” workshop. She is the lead researcher of the SSHRC funded Japanese Women Directors Project and has produced three series of public-facing educational videos on Japanese cinema as well as interviews with international scholars of Japanese film (hosted on her YouTube channel). Her experiments with videographic criticism live on her Vimeo account.
Dayna McLeod (Performance and Media Artist-Scholar)
Dr. Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist-scholar who actively engages queer and feminist approaches to research-creation through art and media. In 2023, she co-organized and led Embodying the Video Essay, a workshop made possible with funding from a 2023 Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection (SSHRC) Grant. Here she presented five exercises that she developed to established film and media scholars and PhD students that centred embodiment in relation to video essay making. Her video work has been featured in FilmExplorer, Recycled Screenings, and in the Sight & Sound Best of Video Essays for 2021, 2022, and 2023. She is currently working with AI tools to explore human to non-human collaboration, embodiment, and performativity, figuring herself as an AI actor called DaynAI.
Alison Peirse (University of Leeds)
Dr. Alison Peirse is a Professor of Film Studies in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores the intersection of production studies and feminist film historiographies, and illuminates women’s invisible or overlooked contributions to genre film and television production. Her video essays have played at film festivals across Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and South-East Asia. She has won ‘Best Documentary’ and ‘Best Short Film’ awards at festivals around the world, including Brazil, India, Italy, Japan, North America, Peru and Spain. Her video essays have featured in the Sight & Sound Best Video Essays of 2022 and 2023, and have been published, or are forthcoming, in Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, [in]Transition, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture and Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements. In 2022, she participated in the Scholarship in Sound and Image Workshop at Middlebury College. With her Middlebury alumni, she then secured a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant, “Embodying the Video Essay: Advanced Methods in Videographic Theory Through Global Communities of Practice”, which resulted in the Embodying the Video Essay workshop at Bowdoin College in July 2023. During this period, she was also awarded an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, for her Feminist Horror Cinema project, from which she developed Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History, a year-long online training and mentoring programme for critics working on women horror filmmakers from the Global Majority. The result of this programme is 30 video essays and accompanying creator statements, which will be published in MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture in Spring 2024. You can find out more about her films, books and essays on her website.
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