World-making remembrances in queer audiovisual culture - list of participants

Ester M. Bergsmark is a filmmaker, artist, artistic researcher and PhD in Performative and Media-Based Practices. With an erotic curiosity, their work seeks to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film by looking closely at, challenging, and playing with different cinematic conventions concerning truth, authenticity, storytelling, the visual, and the visible. Their doctoral project “voice under” consisted of performative film screenings and a book. They co-directed with Mark Hammarberg the documentary feature Maggie in Wonderland (Honorable Mention at CPH:DOX 2008 and Guldbagge Award for Best Documentary 2009), and they later directed the documentary She Male Snails (2012). Ester’s debut fiction feature Something Must Break won the Tiger Award for Best Film at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014 and has been awarded at several international film festivals. Something Must Break is considered a global milestone in its authentic portrayal of non-binary/trans people, starring a stunning Saga Becker, the first trans actress to win various film awards in Sweden.

Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at King’s College London. She is the author of Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, which was published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). Clara has published widely on feminist and queer film and media, including essays on feminist citational practice, Netflix and queer taste, cinephilia, queer adolescence, adaptation, postfeminism, the lesbian sex scene and the work of filmmakers such as Dee Rees, Lisa Cholodenko and Céline Sciamma. Her academic writing has appeared in the journals Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Theory and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. She is currently working on two new book projects: an auto-theoretical study of ambivalent masculinity, and a BFI classic on Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Marie Falksten is an artist and filmmaker. Her painting, photography, and printmaking have been exhibited at numerous solo as well as group exhibitions, including at Artphoto Collection gallery in Gothenburg. She studied painting and sculpture in Jerusalem before attending The Academy of Arts and Craft in Gothenburg. After working at a film production firm, she took courses at the Dramatic Institute in Manuscript/Drama, 16mm film photography, and film editing. Through her engagement in FilmCentrum and the People’s Cinema, which included the organizing of the first Women’s Film Week in Gothenburg in 1974, she got involved in the women’s movement. This led to participation in a lot of projects, including the short film Eva and Maria (Tjejfilm, 1983) and the organization Women’s Cinema, which showed about seventy films and held seminars at the Women’s House during five years. She was also involved in organizing lesbian and gay film festivals in Gothenburg in the 1980s. One of the films screened in both contexts was Avskedet (The Farewell, Tuija-Maija Niskanen, 1982). 

Anu Koivunen is a media scholar and professor of Gender Studies at University of Turku, Finland. She has written about affective historiography, feminist and queer film theory, Finnish cinema and television history, political journalism and platformed everyday lives. She is currently leading two research projects, one on the history of Finnish public service broadcasting company as cultural agent (YLE 2022–2024) and one on “Politicized Intimacies” in Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (Strategic Research Council 2019–2025). She is the co-editor – with Katariina Kyrölä and Ingrid Ryberg – of The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilizing Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2018) and The Nordic Economic, Social and Political Model: Challenges in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021). Her research has been published in Television & New Media, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journalism, Gender, Work & Organization, International Journal of Communication, European Journal of Communication, Discourse, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Lambda Nordica and Journal of Aesthetics & Culture.

Dr. Kata Kyrölä is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the department of Culture, Communication and Media, the IOE, University College London. Their most recent research explores queer Indigenous and Sámi sensibilities in contemporary media, and their earlier work has explored themes such as the relationship between body image and media imagery, fat and queer digital activism, trigger warnings online, pornography use, and racialized politics of ‘bad feeling’. Their publications include The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media (2014), The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures (2018, co-editor with Anu Koivunen and Ingrid Ryberg), a special issue on Nordic queer cinema (2021, co-editor) for lambda nordica and articles in journals such as Feminist Theory, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Sexualities and Social Media + Society.

Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer. Recent projects include the artistic research project Queer Moving Images (2013-2017) at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg and the SAQMI archive, https://saqmi.se. Films to mention is cum pane – the one you share your bread with, densen, 13 Related Sewing Machines and Spermwhore. Linder’s films are in distribution by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, Filmform, CFMDC in Toronto, Heure Exquise in France and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York. Linder worked at Filmform – a foundation dedicated to promotion, distribution and preservation of Swedish Art Film and Experimental Video in Sthlm between 2004-2012. Linders works have been exhibited and screened at Rotterdam Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, ICA London, Gallery Alkatraz in Ljubljana, stadtprojektionen in St Gallen, The Swedish Institute in Paris, Havremagasinet and at Arsenal Cinema in Berlin.

Rachel Pierce is Research Coordinator at KvinnSam at the Humanities Libraries, University of Gothenburg. She has a PhD in gender and women's history and an MLIS in library and information science. Her research interests are grounded in a background as a women’s and gender historian. She is also interested in photography, digitalization, and archives. These interests have led to research on the development of feminism within political institutions, gendered political journalism during the Cold War, and how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class can be expressed in descriptive metadata for materials from cultural heritage institutions. She is also interested in the relationship(s) between digital and physical iterations of archives, with a focus on how classification systems do or do not articulate the relations between physical and digital materials and collections. Outside of work, Rachel volunteers at Hagabion, where she sometimes can sneak in a film between selling tickets.

Ingrid Ryberg is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of Gothenburg. She is the author of the forthcoming book Swedish film feminism: Agitating exceptionalism during the Second Wave (Bloomsbury, 2024), and co-editor, with Anu Koivunen and Kata Kyrölä, of the volume The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures (2018, MUP), as well as a special issue on Nordic queer cinema for lambda nordica (2021). Her current project “Queer world-making in the welfare state” is a reception study exploring the role of audiovisual media in queer counter publics in Sweden between 1944–89 (Swedish Research Council 2022-2024). Ryberg is also the director of the documentaries An Army of Lovers (2018) and Dragkingdom of Sweden (together with Åsa Ekman, 2002), the short Phone Fuck (2009), and the interactive performance installations The Setting of Desire: Cinemaoke in the Celluloid Closet (2019) and Invites: Cinemaoke in Bergman’s Closet (2018).

Eliza Steinbock (they/them) is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies and director of the research platform Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. Driving their interdisciplinary research is the question of how local visual and material cultures can be marshalled to respond to global challenges of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms experienced by marginalised people, foremost identified as queer and trans. They acquired funding for “The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking and Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces” (NWO Smart Culture 2020-2025) and “Perverse Collections: Building Europe's Queer and Trans Archives” (European Joint Programme Initiative - Cultural Heritage 2023-2025). They authored the Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded best first book, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019) and is co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020). Together with Susan Stryker and Jian Neo Chen, Eliza co-edits the Duke book series ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After. https://www.elizasteinbock.com/