MEDIATING PRACTICES 
New directions in visual anthropology and cross-cultural mediamaking

This weeklong festival at Temple University engages the question, what next? in the arts and praxis of cultural representation. The festival includes screenings, lectures, and a daylong symposium of scholars and mediamakers. The event is free and open to the public.

Kelly Askew (University of Michigan)
Kelly Askew has pursued extensive fieldwork in East Africa along the Swahili Coast of Tanzania and Kenya on topics relating to music and politics, media, performance, nationalism, socialism, and postsocialism. In addition to academic work, she is actively involved in film and television production, having worked in various capacities on two feature films and a number of documentary films .

Rebecca Baron (CalArts)
Rebecca Baron's award-winning experimental and documentary films have been screened extensively in the US and abroad(including Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Cinimathhque Frangaise, Oberhausen, Viennale) Her film "okay bye-bye" was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has also worked as a documentary film editor most notably for Pennebaker and Associates. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and MFA from UC San Diego. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Michel Brault (Nanook Films)
Michel Brault is a principle figure of Quebecois cinema and the cinema verite movement. He established himself as a leading cinema verite cinematographer and director in the late 1950s. Heis noted for his acclaimed collaborations with Jean Rouch and countryman Claude Jutra, and for his long career of making awarding films in both documentary and narrative form.

Kathy Brew (Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival)
Kathy Brew is a festival curator of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. She is the director of Thundergulch and was formerly senior associate producer of City Arts/WNET. Her publications include: San Francisco Focus, World Art, Civilization, High Performance, Shift, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Talk Back!, Artcoast, Afterimage. Her films and video projects include: Rabbit in the Moon and Regret to Inform.

Tim Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania)
Timothy Corrigan's work in film studies has focused on modern American and international cinema, as well as pedagogy and film. His books include New German Film: The Displaced Image, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Writing about Film, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, and Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. His most recent book is The Film Experience (co-authored with Patricia White), and he is presently concluding research on a book-length study titled The Essay Film.

Lucien Taylor (Harvard University)
Lucien Taylor teaches in the departments of Visual & Environmental Studies and Anthropology, and heads up the Film Study Center and the Media Anthropology Laboratory, at Harvard University. He is currently immersed in a long-term filming project, Big Timber, with Lisa Barbash, about the 'naturecultures' of sheepherders in the American West. The film elliptically explores the ranchers' and herders' relationships to the land, their animals, and each other, as well as to various other constituencies and ideologies, ranging from environmentalism to globalization, impinging on their lives.

Philip Alperson (Temple - CLA)
Philip Alperson's scholarly work is in aesthetics, the philosophy of the arts, theory of culture, value theory, and theories of interpretation and criticism, with special interests in the philosophy of music and philosophical questions concerning creativity, performance and improvisation. He is a recognized scholar who has authored many journal articles. In addition, he has served as the editor of several books and journals, including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Alperson is currently the general editor of Blackwell Publishers' Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series and serves on the editorial board of the Temple University Press.

Roderick Coover (Temple - SCT)
Roderick Coover's documentary and experimental films and new media works include Cultures In Webs and The Language of Wine. His works have been featured at festivals, exhibitions, and conferences including at M.I.T's Media In Transition conferences I, II, and IV and at Milwaukee's Center for 20th Century Studies. Coover's papers have been published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, and Visual Anthropology.

Paul Stoller (Temple - CLA)
Paul Stoller has been conducting ethnographic research in West Africa and New York City for more than 30 years. He is the author of 10 books, including the awarding winning Money Has No Smell, and has published more than 30 essays in scholarly journals. He has received numerous grants and awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jayasinhji Jhala (Temple - CLA)
Jayasinhji Jhala is director of Temple's visual anthropology media lab and the undergraduate track in visual anthropology. He has made over fifteen ethnographic films that illustrate the cultures of India and the U.S. His written publications address issues about art and anthropology, nomadism, religious worship, indigenous interpretations of local culture, ethnographic filmmaking and its reception, photography, Hindu marriage, and Rajput ideology and politics.

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon (Temple - SCT)
A KIMMIKA L. H. WILLIAMS-WITHERSPOON, PH.D Anthropology, MA Anthropology, M.F.A. in Playwriting, GRADUATE CERTIFICATE in Women's Studies, B.A. Journalism, is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer and Head of Undergraduate Advising in the Department of Theater. Winner of the PEW Charitable Trusts Award for Scriptwriting in 2000, Williams-Witherspoon is the author of over twenty plays, 9 volumes of poetry and has been a contributing writer to a host of anthologies and publications..

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