Elen Lotman is a cinematographer who has shot numerous feature films, shorts and documentaries. For various film projects she has travelled to Japan, Tibet, China, Thailand, India, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Lapland and the Russian Arctic. Her films have won awards and have been shown in competition programs of A-class film festivals like Camerimage, IDFA, Tampere Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival etc. Most recently, her full-length documentary ‘Dear Mother’ was nominated for Best Cinematography at the ReelHeart Filmfestival in Toronto and won the Best Feature Documentary in 2020. Full-length fiction ‘Good Bye Soviet Union’ was nominated for Camerimage Golder Frog in the Directors’ Debuts Competition and won the Black Nights Film Festival audience award in 2021. Her feature film screenplay ‘Container’ made it to the quarterfinalist at the American Film Academy Nicholl screenwriting competition 2021 and her virtual exhibitions filmed for Tallinn Art Hall were chosen among world’s 10 best virtual exhibitions of 2020 by both New York Times and Wallpaper Magazine.
Elen Lotman is the Associate Professor of Film Arts at Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) of Tallinn University and curates the artistic research branch in BFM PhD studies. Elen was elected co-President of the European Federation of Cinematographers (IMAGO) after serving as IMAGO Board Member and also Diversity and Inclusion Committee co-chair. She defended her PhD thesis titled “Experiential Heuristics in Fiction Film Cinematography” with laudatur in 2021.

Hans Maes is Professor & Vice Dean at LUCA School of Arts (University of Leuven, Belgium). He has authored papers on a variety of topics in aesthetics, including the art of portraiture, aesthetic melancholy, existential aesthetics, the role of intention in the interpretation of art, and the relation between art and pornography. The latter is the subject of two essay collections: Art and Pornography (co-edited with Jerrold Levinson, Oxford University Press, 2012) and Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). His recent books include Conversations on Art and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2017), Portraits and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), and Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration (Routledge, 2021). Maes is Vice-President of the British Society of Aesthetics, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent, and a former Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent.

Kalliopi Ioumpa, PhD, is a visual artist, neuropsychology researcher, and mental health counselor based in Amsterdam.

She currently holds a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, investigating the emotional, bodily, and neural responses to culture and heritage.

Alongside her academic background, she has a degree in Fine Arts and Design from the Unstable Media Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Hons). Her art practice often takes the form of mixed-media installations that explore ways of expressing what cannot be fully articulated in words but can be accessed through embodied knowledge.

She is also trained as a person-centered mental health counselor, play and art therapist, working therapeutically with individuals and groups.

With a background in both science and art, she is invested in cross-disciplinary collaborations and artistic research. She is currently a resident at the STUDIOTOPIA residency, co-founder of the NeuroNarratives art-science residency, and co-organizer of the Art of Neuroscience platform.

Ted Nannicelli, an academic based at The University of Queensland (UQ) in beautiful Brisbane, Australia. Previously, I held an appointment at The University of Waikato in Aotearoa/New Zealand.  I am former editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind and a fellow of The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, with which it is affiliated. I thought about putting a photograph of myself above this text, but I reckon you're better off looking at a picture of the beach.

 I am interested in aesthetics and philosophical questions about the arts. Recent topics of interest include the nature of artistic agency and ethical criticism of art and artists. One current project is a special issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics on AI, art, and ethics, for which submissions are open until 31 August 2026. 

Maarten Coëgnarts is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Antwerp, Researcher in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State. His research on embodied cognition, metaphor, and cinema has been published in journals such as Art & Perception, Metaphor and Symbol, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Projections. He co-edited Embodied Cognition and Cinema (Leuven University Press, 2015) and authored Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (Academic Studies Press, 2019). He is also co-editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind.

Kersti Grunditz Brennan has explored film form in documentary and fiction live action, short and long formats, narrative cinema, archival based stories, essays and experimental hybrids for the past 20 years; for cinema, other art contexts, through research and education. She holds a PhD in Perfomative and Media Based practices, an MFA in choreography, is an established film editor of several award-winning documentaries and has directed documentaries about prominent Scandinavian artists and the festival touring, award winning film The Man Behind the Throne; about Michael Jackson’s choreographer Vincent Paterson; sold to 15 countries. Her film about Swedish ballerina Marie Lindqvist, Marie’s Attitude, premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center in Feb. 2017. In 2017, she was nominated for Best Editing and Best Screenplay at Swedish film awards (Guldbaggen) and for Best documentary at Swedish TV awards (Kristallen) for the feature documentary Citizen Schein, which she edited and co-wrote. She takes on many different creative and educational roles in film processes ranging from movies, TV, art exhibits and stage performances to workshops, research expositions, conference presentations and academic writing. 2023 she received her artistic research PhD in film and media with the multimedia dissertation Beyond Cut and Join – Expanding the creative role of film editing. She is one of the collaborators of the film and research project BLOD which has resulted in several publications, conference presentations and internationally screened films and serves as the foundational research for new projects under the BLODWERK umbrella.

Tomas Vandecasteele is an artist, researcher (FilmEU, Luca School of Arts/KU Leuven) and guest lecturer at Luca School of Arts. After studying philosophy (Ugent) and comparative cultural studies (Ugent) he was a guest lecturer (fashion film) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Ghent/Belgium) and mentor for young photographers for the Antwerp Photo Museum (FoMu).  His work was published in numerous Belgian and international magazines, he had exhibitions at FoMu and MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerpen), among others. He is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, studying how neuroscience, philosophy and portrait photography intersect to explore the evolving meaning of images through the viewer’s perception and emotions.