Michael Albright was born and raised in Reno, Nevada and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004 with a BA in Film Studies and English. He also studied Czech film, literature and black & white photography in Prague at Charles University. Shortly after graduating, he moved to New York City and worked with renowned documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.  Albright then returned home to Reno, NV where he started Project Moonshine, a non-profit organization designed to teach filmmaking skills to teenagers by providing opportunities to document important community events. The first feature film, Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake has been critically acclaimed and screened in top festivals around the world.  He recently completed his MA in Cinema and Media studies at UCLA in 2008 and continues to make films and manage Project Moonshine during the summer.  His approach to teaching incorporates both theory and practice and he is a strong advocate of media literacy. Albright is currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Media Studies at UCSB and working on several documentaries with his other independent production company, Moonpix. His research interests include, American Independent Cinema, Copyright and Fair Use, DIY and Alternative Media, Documentary, and Media Arts and Practice.

Meredith A. Bak received her BA in Media Arts from Brigham Young University in 2004 and her MA in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2006. She has received funding to research Icelandic cinema and has developed projects for interactive children’s theater and children’s television. For the past two years, she co-headed the Education department at Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Her interests include Nordic national cinemas, pedagogical practices, new media, graffiti, museums, and archiving and collecting practices.

Ryan's primary academic concerns exist at the intersections between film theory and production, performance and representation, academia and activism. She sees in film and media the power to create and fulfill desires, alter world views, and break down seemingly immovable power structures. Having received her BA from the University of Southern California in 2004 in Cinema-Television and Creative Writing, Ryan continued on to the University of York in England where she completed her MA in Modern Literature and Culture in 2005. After returning to the States, Ryan worked for Interloper Films, a Los Angeles-based independent documentary production company. She is currently in her second year as a graduate student in Film and Media Studies.

Hye Jean Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies. After graduating from Seoul National University with a BA in French and English, she went on to work as a translator and a reporter at The Korea Times, an English-language daily newspaper. She earned her MA from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA as a recipient of a Fulbright Graduate Study Fellowship. She is currently working on a dissertation project that focuses on global flows of labor, spectral presences and mediated spaces in transnational cinema. Her primary research interests include global media, cultural translation, the historicization of memory, the multiple layering of time and space in audiovisual media, and documentary films.

Maria grew up in the Canadian prairies, where the cold winter forced her to stay inside for most of her childhood, reading and watching TV and film. She followed the cold winter to St. Petersburg Russia, where, severely vitamin D-deprived, she studied Russian language at the St. Petersburg State University and music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. She received her BA in Comparative Literature and Film Studies and her MA also in Film Studies at Emory University. Her Master's thesis explores the work of Soviet director Grigory Kozintsev and his collaborative approach to filmmaking, specifically to his 1964 Hamlet.

Chris Dzialo is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Film & Media Studies, and the Jonathan and Nicholas Lafferty Fellow for 2008-2009. His current research attempts to interrogate the possibilities and limits of contemporary film and media theory, which he strives to continually put into practice through close readings of cultural texts, contexts and objects. To this end Chris has written several close analyses of film and television programs. "When Balance Goes Bad: How Battlestar Galactica Says Everything and Nothing," was recently published in a Continuum Press anthology titled Cylons in America (winner of the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture). "Frustrated Time: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman" will appear in a forthcoming anthology on complex storytelling from Blackwell. Chris received his Bachelor's degree in Film & Television from Boston University and his Master’s degree in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California.

David Gray is from Albuquerque, New Mexico and likes to return often for green chile. He completed his BFA at New York University in Film Production in 2002. He moved to Santa Barbara from Oakland, where he completed an MA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. His interests include documentary, essayistic filmmaking, trauma, memory, and exile. His MA thesis focuses on the work of Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh.

After receiving her B.A. in International Studies and Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University in Evanston-Chicago, Sarah taught 5th grade and high school media arts in urban public schools.  She completed her M.S.Ed at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2007 and earned her M.A. in Film and Media Studies at UCSB in 2009.  Last year, she published an article entitled “Turkish Popular Cinema: National Claims, Transnational Flows” which explores cinema-TV convergence in contemporary Turkish popular cinema.  Her current research focuses on Internet practices and telecommunications markets in the Middle East and Europe, and she is framing her dissertation project around global Internet policy harmonization.  She was recently awarded an Institute of Turkish Studies (Georgetown University) grant to study the Turkish language at Bogazici University over the summer.

Anastasia received her B.F.A in Fine Art Media from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.  Her film and video work focused primarily on narrative structure, deconstruction and re-contextualization of filmic conventions, and reflexivity.  She became interested in systems of perceived or accepted information, peripheral scientific theories, and diagrams and illustrations in relation to fallacy, corruption, and arbitrariness within the construction of knowledge.  She is currently in her first year of the PhD program and is concentrating on the philosophical and metaphysical undercurrents of narrativity and the relatedness to systems of fact and knowingness.  She hopes to continue making work balancing on the crux of theory and practice.

Regina received her BA in Anthropology and Film Studies from UC Berkeley and then went on to live and work in Rome, Italy where she was a founding member and set designer for a fledgling theater group. She found her way back to the states and back to school at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and Archival Studies at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. For several years before returning to school to pursue her PhD, Regina worked as a film archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Through her experience in film archiving, Regina became acutely aware of just how much the interpretation, writing and dissemination of history depends on continued access to these primary sources. Her current research interests include theorizing the archive, the use of audio-visual media in early planetariums and science museums, the films of the Marshall Plan and the intersection of Cold War culture and history.

Rahul received his Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Technology from DA-IICT Gandhinagar, India, following which he worked initially as a software engineer and then later as a research associate in Contextual Innovation. After receiving a MA in Communication Studies from Bowling Green State University in 2008, he is presently starting his first year of graduate studies in the department of Film and Media Studies. Rahul's academic preoccupations often meander into imaginings about media's role with(in) alternative futures for/of politics and technology. His current research interests involve looking at alternative media and New Social Movements, critical simulation in ideological videogames, and how new Bollywood representations of India transform posturing(s) of hybridized Indian cosmopolitan and diasporic identities.