Jason Mittell – Workshop Director and Lead Instructor:
Jason Mittell organizes, plans, and supervises the workshop, both in its content and design. He will be present each day during the two-week period, working with participants, leading discussions, presenting assignments, mentoring technology use, and guiding workshop critiques. Mittell co-founded this workshop with Christian Keathley in 2015, and has been teaching and co-directing it ever since. Keathley and Mittell received the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Innovative Pedagogy Award for this work in 2020, and published the multimedia book The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy with Catherine Grant in 2019.

Jason Mittell (Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison) is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009), How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson, NYU Press, 2013; second edition 2020), Narrative Theory and Adaptation. (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015). As a founding member of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Public Policy Committee, he was instrumental in drafting policy statements on copyright and fair use in teaching and publishing. As a founding member of MediaCommons Editorial Board, he has been involved in experiments in digital publishing and new forms of open peer-to-peer review, including as founding project manager for [in]Transition. His first videographic essay, “Adaptation.‘s Anomalies,” was published in [in]Transition in 2016; he has since published more videographic work and presented his videographic scholarship at numerous conferences, exhibitions, and workshops, as well as writing two essays about videographic criticism and digital humanities. In 2022, he received a NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication supporting the development of his videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad, which was published in 2024 by Lever Press.

Catherine Grant – Expert Mentor:

Catherine Grant (PhD in Latin American Studies, University of Leeds) will be in residence for one week of the workshop to mentor the participants and discuss her own videographic works, as she has for every annual iteration since its founding. Grant is Honorary Professor at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Honorary Research Fellow and former Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. She is also an elected member of Academia Europeaea since 2020, in the Film, Media and Visual Studies section.

Active producer of well over 200 videographic critical works since 2009, Grant is the founder of Film Studies for Free and Audiovisualcy, and the editor of two foundational collections of work on digital and videographic forms of film studies (Frames Cinema Journal, 2012) and The Audiovisual Essay (REFRAME, 2014) . She is also the author of more than 30 articles specifically on videographic criticism, including “Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies” (Mediascape, ULCA’s journal of cinema and media studies, 2013), “The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking” (Aniki: the Portuguese Journal of Moving Image Studies, 2014), “The Audiovisual Essay as Performative Research” and, most recently, “Irresistible Instrumentalism: Materially Thinking through Music-Making in the Story-Worlds of Silent Films” (NECSUS: European Journal of Media Research, 2016, 2022). See her complete list of publications on these topics here. In addition, Grant has taught videographic criticism and digital forms of screen studies material thinking since 2011 at the Universities of London, Sussex,  and internationally. She is a founding co-editor of [in]Transition.

Dayna McLeod – Instructor

Dayna McLeod (PhD in interdisciplinary studies, Concordia University), is a queer video and performance 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 funded by 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 work on and with sleep includes Restless, a body of work that examines queer sleep, labour, and intimacy using accessible surveillance technologies, and In Dreams, an interactive video installation that continues this work into dream space and was produced for The Sociability of Sleep. Watch Me Sleep is a video essay that examines her live and pre-recorded performances of sleeping, and is in a special issue of Intermédialités that she co-edited with Dr. Alanna Thain and Dr. Aleksandra Kaminska (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. Find Dayna’s work on Vimeo or on her website. Dayna participated in the 2022 Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, and we are thrilled to welcome her back to Middlebury.

Ethan Murphy – Audiovisual Technical Director

Ethan Murphy has been part of the workshop team from the beginning in 2015, leading the technological instruction and mentoring participants. He will be present throughout the workshop, giving tutorials on various software platforms and providing general technical and project support. As the Audiovisual Technical Director for the Film & Media Culture Department at Middlebury College (where the workshop will be held), Murphy is thoroughly familiar with the equipment and fully prepared to support the technical needs of the event. Murphy is also a practicing filmmaker and teacher of film production and cinematography.

Co-Founder and Director Emeritus:

Christian Keathley (Ph.D. in Film Studies, University of Iowa; M.F.A. in Filmmaking, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is the author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2005) and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Keathley’s videographic production work has been screened at a variety of international locations, including: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference (2006 & 2011); the ‘Media in Transition’ conference at MIT (2009); as guest speaker at the University of London Screen Studies Group (2012); as keynote presenter at the University of Antwerp conference on ‘Photogenie and Cinephilia’ (2012); as keynote presenter at the University of Pittsburgh conference on ‘Cinephilia/ Cinephobia’ (2012); at the Deutschese Filminstitut Filmmuseum conference on ‘The Audiovisual Essay: Practice & Theory’ in Frankfurt (2013); and at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. He is the author of several publications directly relevant to this workshop, including: “La Camèra Stylo: Film Scholarship and the Video Essay” in the volume The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Routledge, 2011) and “Teaching the Scholarly Video Essay” in Frames vol. 1 (special issue, “Film and Moving Image Studies: Reborn Digital”). He is a founding co-editor of [in]Transition and co-founded and co-directed this workshop from 2015 to 2022.