Co-Directors
Christopher Harris
Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of optically-printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African-American literature.
His international exhibitions include a career retrospective at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (Brazil), solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland), Images Festival (Toronto), Encontro de Cinema Negro (Rio de Janeiro), Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video (Berlin) and a solo performance at the Essay Film Festival (London). Among his many awards, he most recently received Prismatic Ground’s second annual Ground Glass Award for outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media.
Janaína Oliveira
Janaína Oliveira is a curator and researcher who holds a doctorate in history and was a Fulbright scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University (USA). She is one of the founders of FICINE – Fórum Itinerante de Cinema Negro. Her research focuses on Black Brazilian and aphrodiasporic cinemas and also on African cinematographies. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations and the Ministry of Culture of Brazil. She has worked as a programmer and consultant for several festivals worldwide. In 2018, in partnership with Tessa Boerman and Peter Van Hoof, she programmed the 28-film programme ‘Soul in the Eye: Zózimo Bulbul’s legacy and the contemporary emergence of black Brazilian Cinema’ at the 48th edition of the Rotterdam International Festival (IFFR). In 2019, she collaborated on the Black Light Retrospective exhibition at the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival. She served as the programmer for the 66th Flaherty Film Seminar.
Cris Lira
Cris Lira specializes in Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research interests are mostly related to contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature and culture with an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. She is interested in women's writing, the connection between representations of female characters and violence, exile aesthetics, and post dictatorship, gender and memory studies. Her articles have been published in Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, Revista Mulheres e Literatura, among other journals. Lira is also a creative writer. In 2020, she published O mundo é esse lugar (The World is Such a Place) as part of the second Mulherio das Letras (Women of Letters) collection of single-authored books.
Student Collaborators
Kyler Johnson
Having studied Mandarin, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, Kyler Johnson has the goal to bridge people through language. A writer of essays, poetry, and translations, he hopes to one day be an established professor and literary translator.
Gleisson Alves Santos
Gleisson Alves Santos is from Beiru, a historically Black neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. He is currently a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) at The University of Iowa. He is an educator, translator, and researcher. He is interested in inter- and transdisciplinary praxes that through language aim to the disarticulation of systems of oppression and world transformation. Through this perspective, he teaches language and literature, translates, and engages in academic and artistic research projects.
Victória Lane Silva
Victória Lane Silva is the daughter of Joanai and Jocemir, and the sister of Jaci and João. She is from Salvador – Bahia. Passionate for literature and TV shows, she is an English and Portuguese teacher, translator, copy editor and proofreader. Victória holds a B.A in Portuguese and English Language from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and she is pursuing her M.A in Cultural and Intersemiotic Translation, developing research on Black Translation of Afrodiasporic texts. Victória is currently, a 2022-2023 Fulbright grantee in the FLTA program and is teaching Portuguese at the University of Georgia.