Malachy Browne is a senior story producer on the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for international reporting for coverage of Russian culpability in crimes around the world, including the bombing of hospitals in Syria. Mr. Brown co-directed “Day of Rage,” a documentary capturing in vivid detail what happened during the U.S. Capitol riot. He has led investigations into the killing of Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans by police, Russian airstrikes on hospitals in Syria, the Las Vegas mass shooting, chemical weapons attacks in Syria, extra-judicial military shootings in Nigeria, the Saudi officials who killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, and the killing of a young Palestinian medic along the Gaza-Israel border.
Bora Erden is a spatial researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. At SITU Research, he applies architectural, geospatial and computational techniques to provide forensic evidence to judicial and advocacy organizations, such as the International Criminal Court and Amnesty International. More broadly, his interests lie in finding liberatory applications to algorithmic, particularly image-based, technologies that often rely on existing information frameworks upholding the inevitability of current power, morality and knowledge structures.
Giancarlo Fiorella is an investigator and trainer for Latin America at Bellingcat. He is also a PhD candidate at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, where his research focuses on protest policing and civil conflict.
Joshua Glick is a Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). His articles have appeared in Film History, Jump Cut, The Moving Image, Wired, and Film Quarterly. Dr. Glick recently co-curated the exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. He is currently working on a new book that explores the rising investment in nonfiction from both the left and right of the political spectrum.
Tory Jeffay is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College affiliated with the Department of Film and Media. Her book project, “Rogue Images: The Birth of Visual Evidence,” looks to the history of photography and film as evidence before Rodney King to better understand contemporary politics of digital media evidence and the inherent epistemological fallibility of photographic media. Her work has been published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Sandra Ristovska is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies how, under what circumstances, and to what ends images shape the pursuit of justice and human rights in institutional and legal contexts nationally and internationally. Her research is informed by her experiences as a documentary filmmaker and premised on the understanding that without systematic guidance and applications for treating images as evidence, civil rights and human rights may be disparately recognized and upheld. Her publications include the award-winning monograph, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession (The MIT Press, 2021), an edited book, Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (Palgrave, 2018), and over two dozen journal articles and book chapters.
Greg Siegel is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He researches and teaches in media history and theory, science and technology studies, cultural and critical theory, and sound studies. He is the author of Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke UP). His essays have appeared in Cabinet, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Discourse, Grey Room, Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions (Wesleyan UP), The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, and Television and New Media. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of unexplained sounds.
Patrick Brian Smith is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, working on a project entitled Mediated Forensics. He completed his PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in 2020. His research interests include documentary theory and practice, spatial and political theory, forensic media, and human rights media activism. He has taught courses on visual culture, film and media histories, documentary theory, and activist media cultures. His book Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image is forthcoming from Legenda/MHRA. He is the director of the Emergent Nonfiction Lab and co-convener of the BAFTSS Documentary SIG. His work has been, or will be, published in journals such as JCMS, Discourse, Media, Culture & Society, NECSUS, Afterimage, and Mediapolis.
Mitali Thakor is an Assistant Professor in the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University with affiliations in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is currently working on a book project, Facing the Child (MIT Press), an ethnography of artifice, evidence, and the global policing of child pornography. Her second project is a multidisciplinary study of robotic and animate companions in eldercare, childcare, and other spaces of intimate companionship. Her research and teaching interests include digital policing, computer vision, content moderation of child sexual abuse material, digital STS, queer studies of the child, robotics, avatars, and digital companions.
LaCharles Ward is a cultural theorist whose research interest spans the areas of Black visual culture as theory and method, critical theories of Blackness, the history of ideas, photography (histories and theories) and the cultural study of law. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2005 the founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007 he set up, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. He is the author of many books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Roundabout Revolutions, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture. Eyal held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
