Sticky Films

Fadekemi Olawoye is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Research Training Program “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She holds a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. Her research interests include Nollywood studies, costume and makeup, identity formations, and African popular culture.

Clara Podlesnigg is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Digital Film Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her dissertation, written as part of the Research Training Program “Configurations of Film”, focuses on holograms and promises of technology in the context of digital platforms. She is a section editor for the journal Open Cultural Studies. Her research interests span everyday cultures, celebrity studies, educational media, gender and technology.

Olja Alvir is an author and researcher based in Vienna. She studied Comparative Literature in Vienna and Zagreb, and her interdisciplinary work spans literature, film, cultural criticism, and political essays. Her dissertation, Liberation afoot, examines early Yugoslav partisan cinema and its depiction of movement as a symbol of political resistance. Alvir received the Ingeborg Ohnheiser Prize for her master’s thesis and worked and taught at the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Vienna, from 2022to 2025. Currently, she is a Junior Fellow at the ifk International Research Center for Cultural Studies, University of Art and Design Linz. Her debut novel Kein Meer (Zaglossus, 2016) was followed by the award-winning poem Pomelo (2021) and international poetry publications, including in The Kenyon Review. Her trilingual poetry collection Spielfeld/Špilfeld/Playground appeared in 2022, and in 2025, Alvir was awarded the Prize for Literature in Exile in the Category of Poetry.

Marie Sophie Beckmann is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, where she currently works on the interplay of screen media and protest cultures. She completed her PhD as part of the DFG Research Training Group“Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her texts have been published in Cinéma&Cie, Journal of Cinema andMedia Studies, montage AV, and several anthologies. She is co-editor of Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from Below (Diaphanes, 2025) and author of Films That Spill: Beyond theCinema of Transgression (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

Fabienne Bieri (she/they) is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, researcher, and community organizer based in Switzerland. She is completing her PhD at the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Geneva. Both her research and artistic practice focus on themes of gender, sexuality, queerness, sex work and pornography. She is interested in understanding forms of repression and exclusion, but also exploring strategies of resistance and imagining new and utopian ways of relating to one another.

Miriam De Rosa researches and teaches film theories and media archaeology at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, where she leads the MA in Economy and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities and serves as an Associate Professor in film and screen media. Her most recent publication is the monograph Grosse Fatigue (2024). Miriam is also active within IMACS, NECS and as anindependent film curator.

Silas Edwards is a doctoral researcher in visual history at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Gießen. He previously worked at the Frankfurt University Collections, and his research continues to center on collections and museums as resources to develop critical perspectives on visual, social and environmental history. His doctoral project examines the role of industrial color printing in popularizing butterfly collecting around 1900, both by aiding classification and by facilitating the colonial trade in ‘exotic’ insect specimens.

Rodrigo Faustini dos Santos is an independent artist and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Film Studies from Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and has published on experimental film and video, the poetics of noise and ruins, and the materialities of film, video, and digital moving images. His films and videos have screened at Ars Eletronica, Annecy Animation Festival, Anifilm, Images festival, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Festival de Habana, Beijing International Short Film Festival and Stuttgarter Filmwinter, among others.

Fenja Holz holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a master’s in Film Culture from Goethe University Frankfurt. Shelives and works in Vienna.

Philipp Dominik Keidl is assistant professor of Screen Media in Transition and co-coordinator of MI3: Media Industries, Infrastructures and Institutions at Utrecht University

Franziska Kohler is a student at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. She is currently doing her MA in Film Culture.

Andrea Mariani is associate professor at the University of Udine, teaching Media Theory (BA), Philology of Cinema (MA) and Exhibition Design (MA). He is PI of the PRIN2022 project, Film BaseMatters: A Material Approach to the History of Small-Gauge Film in Italy, funded by UE-PNRR of the Italian Ministry of University Research.

Jurij Meden is a curator at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. Previously, he worked as head of the program department at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana and as curator of film exhibitions at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NewYork.

Emma Merkling is lecturer (assistant professor) in British Art at the University of Manchester. Emma teaches and writes about the intersections between nineteenth-century art and history of science. Recent publications have explored materials ranging from Spiritualist painting and physics to Victorian photography, ecology, and plant-human erotics.

Nils Meyn is a research associate at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and is currently pursuing a PhD in the research traininggroup “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt. They previously completed the master’s program Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation at Goethe University Frankfurt and later received a research proposal scholarship from the Gutenberg Graduate School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Mainz. In their dissertation, Nils explores the material and affective history of the porn film collection of Schwules Museum in Berlin, framing the collection as an index of queer desires. At the museum, they conduct research, volunteer, and co-facilitate archival workshops focused on the porn collection. In addition, Nils works in a project that catalogs and provides access to the archive of AIDS-Hilfe Frankfurt, a health service organization that played a pivotal roleduring Germany’s AIDS crisis.

Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of English, Africana Studies, and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES) at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail, she has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on “Care and Its Complexities” and ASAP Journalon “Queer Form;” and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press.

Jamal Phoenix is an Afro-Créole FTM (transmasculine) pornstar, dancer, sexworker and sex-educator currently based in Europe. Jamal’s career centers on his self-proclaimed “Neo-Masculinity/High-Masc” identity. He works to amplify Transmasc-Fag visibility through stage performances, films and educational workshops, while also contributing to the creation of archives. He is a professional Afro-contemporary dancer, poledancer, gogo-boy, as well as Fetish performer and pro-Submissive. His artistry blurs thelines between sexuality, performing arts and fetish practices.

Alexandra Schneider is professor of Film and Media Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Her research focuses on amateur media, decentered film histories, and format studies. She co-authored Children Reinventing Cinema. Snapshots from theEarly 21st Century (meson press 2025).

Laura Teixeira is a curator and researcher based in Berlin andFrankfurt am Main, Germany. She is writing a dissertation as part of the Research Training Group “Configurations of Film” (Goethe University Frankfurt) about the presence of moving image artin Global South Biennials. She works as a film programmer for the DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and is also the director of the festival of Latin-American cinema “Días de Cine” in Frankfurt.

Julia Willms is a film and media studies researcher. Her work focuses on moving image culture and its interference with public discourse, the portrayal of violence in the media, documentary film theory, popular culture, and digital media cultures. She holds a doctorate from the University of Cologne, where she currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary research training group “connecting-excluding”.

Sigal Yona is a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where she is currently working on a project entitled “The Longue Durée of the Eden Cinema in Tel Aviv.” Her research interests include language and cultural mediation, transnational studies, cinema memory, and film history and historiography. Her work employs an interdisciplinary approach, combining archival and oral history methods. She has previously taught at Vassar College and Middlebury College.