Our Team
We are a group of scholars and media makers who share an urgent concern for climate change, the socio-economic forces that drive it, and the manifold environmental problems and forms of social inequality it amplifies.
JP Sniadecki
Group Leader
Documentary Media, Northwestern University School of Communication
J.P. Sniadecki, assistant professor of Radio/Television/Film and director of the MFA in Documentary Media program, is a filmmaker and anthropologist active in China and the United States. whose films explore collective experience, sensory ethnography, and the possibilities of cinema. His films are in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and have screened at festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno, New York, AFI, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Viennale, Torino, BAFICI, RIDM, Cinema du Reel, FICUNAM, and DOChina as well as at venues such as the 2014 Whitney Biennale, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale, the Guggenheim, Vienna’s MAC, Beijing’s UCCA, and the Shenzhen Biennale. His films include Chaiqian/Demolition (2010), winner of the Joris Ivens Award; Foreign Parts (2010), winner of two Leopards at Locarno and named Best Film at the Punto de Vista Film Festival and DocsBarcelona; People’s Park (2012), named Best Anthropological Film at Festival dei Popoli; and Yumen (2013), named Best Experimental Film and Best Chinese Film at the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. Coorganizer of the traveling film series “Cinema on the Edge” and “China Now,” which showcase independent cinema from China, he has written articles and interviews for Cinema Scope and contributed essays to Visual Anthropology Review and the edited volume DV-Made China (Hawaii University Press).
Corey Byrnes
Group Leader
Asian Languages & Cultures, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University
Corey Byrnes received a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. His research and teaching areas include modern and contemporary Chinese literary and visual culture, critical animal studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the co-founder and co-director of Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities’ Environmental Humanities Workshop, which is the center of a lively and growing community of faculty and graduate students whose work engages with environmental issues. The Environmental Humanities Workshop hosts a wide range of events, including work-in-progress workshops, reading groups, film screenings, artist talks, and public lectures by some of the leading figures in the environmental humanities.
Byrnes’ areas of specialization include 19th-21st century Sinophone literature, film, and visual culture; comparative environmental humanities; animal studies; landscape and spatial studies; and classical Chinese poetry and prose (ancient through Song Dynasty). He is a core faculty member of Northwestern’s Comparative Literary Studies Program.
Michael Metzger
Group Leader
Block Museum, Northwestern University
Michael Metzger’s role at The Block encompasses curation of media art in the galleries and in the Block’s auditorium. He directs Block Cinema, a film series that showcases contemporary global cinema and revival screenings, often featuring in-person discussions and collaborations across campus. Across curation, writing, and teaching, Metzger seeks to generate knowledge, experience, and community through the moving image. He’s always eager to partner with students and faculty on film programs, guest filmmaker visits, class screenings, and curriculum development.
Ines Sommer
Documentary Media, Northwestern University School of Communication
Ines Sommer is a filmmaker, curator, and media arts advocate whose films have tackled topics including the environment, the arts, participatory democracy, and human rights. Her recent documentary Seasons of Change on Henry’s Farm follows organic farmer Henry Brockman as he grapples with the impact of a changing climate on his family farm in rural Illinois. The film is currently making the festival rounds and won the “Best Documentary” award at the 2020 Vail Film Festival. Other projects include the human rights documentary Beneath the Blindfold and the MacArthur Foundation-funded Count Me In, which aired on PBS stations across the nation in 2016. Ines has also directed a good number of short experimental and hybrid projects and her camerawork has been featured in numerous award-winning documentaries by Chicago’s Kartemquin Films, Kindling Group, and many other filmmakers. She has held positions as a film programmer and arts administrator, served on the Board of Directors of Chicago Filmmakers and IFP Chicago, and is co-founder and executive director of Percolator Films, a 501c3 non-profit media arts organization. Ines is particularly interested in audience engagement, community-based programming, and sustainability efforts for the documentary field. Ines was included in New City magazine’s annual Film 50 list three times for being “one of 50 individuals who shape Chicago’s film scene.” Ines holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Calum Walter
Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University School of Communication
Calum Walter is an artist working in sound and moving image. His recent work has focused on human and machine error, collective anxieties, and the cultural moment as it is shaped by emerging and consumer technologies. His films have screened at the Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, FIC Valdivia, Vienna Independent Shorts, Images Festival, Slamdance, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre. He is a 2018 MacDowell Fellow and has received awards from the Harpo Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. His work has been covered by Filmmaker Magazine, Fandor, Reverse Shot, and Cinema Scope Magazine. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern University.
Laskhmi Padmanabhan
Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University School of Communication
Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film and the Screen Cultures doctoral program. She came to Northwestern from Dartmouth College, where she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Society of Fellows faculty in its Department of Film & Media Studies. Her research interests are in the fields of experimental cinema and new media art, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, and queer feminisms. Her current book project, The Untimely Image: Cinematic Form and Postcolonial Refusal, explores the ways in which experiments with cinematic time in queer feminist video art from South Asia manifest radical political desires. Her writing is published or forthcoming in journals including Art History, Post45, Camera Obscura, New Review of Film & Television Studies, and Women & Performance. She has programmed experimental film and video at venues including BRIC Contemporary, AS220, and Magic Lantern Cinema. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Kang Kang
Comparative Literary Studies + Asian Languages and Cultures
Kang Kang (she/her) is a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. She is a Mellon cluster fellow in Comparative Race and Diaspora and a member of the Critical Theory cluster. Her research centers questions of political desire in postsocialist Sinophone cultures, and her current project explores the genealogies of pessimisms about Chineseness through race, gender, and the environment. She has written for Artforum China, ArtReview Asia, The Brooklyn Rail, Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art, among others, and organized an exhibition for BRIC Arts Media. As one half of the artist duo Future Host, she has presented performances and installations in the U.S., China, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Ginny Lee
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Environmental Studies, Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences + Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University School of Communication
Ginny Lee is a junior majoring in Radio/Television/Film and environmental sciences. She is interested in exploring how current environmental issues can be communicated through audiovisual media and storytelling to overcome ecological apathy. Her goal as a filmmaker is to incorporate environmental topics in her work from an empathetic perspective.
Rasheed Peters
Graduate Research Assistant
Documentary Media, Northwestern University School of Communication
Born and raised in Jamaica and currently based in Chicago, IL, Rasheed Peters is a storyteller working across multiple mediums. He is an MFA Documentary Media student at Northwestern University where his practice focuses on blending studio art, performance, and video/filmmaking.
His work touches on and seeks to do a lot, but is mainly centered on intergenerational relationships, the Caribbean-American immigrant experience, and the ways in which culture, rituals, and different traditions are being passed down and preserved across generations of Black folk all over the world.