Guest Speakers and Participants

Originally from Addis Ababa, Yimer is co-founder and vice president of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (Migrant Memory Archive) in Rome. He has taught cinema and migration at the University of Venice and various schools. After leaving Ethiopia in 2005 due to political unrest, Yimer crossed the Libyan desert and Mediterranean Sea before reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa on July 30, 2006.

Following a video-making workshop in Rome, Yimer co-authored Il deserto e il mare(The Desert and the Sea) with five other refugees. His acclaimed works include the award-winning documentary Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth, 2008), C.A.R.A. ITALIA(Dear Italy, 2009) and Soltanto il mare (Nothing but the Sea, 2011). He coordinated the collective film project Benvenuti in Italia (Welcome to Italy) and directed Va' pensiero (Walking Stories, 2013), which interweaves accounts of racist attacks in Milan and Florence. His 2015 short film Asmat (Names) commemorates migrant lives lost at sea. waiting 2020 short experimental film.

Filmmaker with postgraduate degrees in philosophy (Master's degree, Paris I), law and political science (Master's degree, Paris IX), as well as in cinema (University of Paris I, University of Paris IX, EHESS), he has been making poetic, political, and experimental films since 2006, focusing particularly on the themes of immigration and social movements. 

He regularly collaborates with artists recognized for both their art and their commitment, such as Archie Shepp, William Parker, Valérie Dréville, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, John Butcher, Serge Teyssot-Gay, and Sylvain Luc.  

His work has been presented at major festivals, institutions, and avant-garde venues around the world (Locarno Film Festival, Viennale, IFFR Rotterdam, Jeonju Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archive, etc.), and has been the subject of regular international retrospectives since 2008, including at the Cinémathèque Française, Doc's Kingdom, Courtisane Festival, Ljubljana Cinematheque, Punto de Vista, Milano Film Festival, Museo Reina Sofia, Kinoarmata/Manifesta14, Muestra de Sao Paulo, and Efebo d'Oro. 

Christina Varvia is a Lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture, at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of the Forensic Architecture agency since 2014 and formerly acted as its Deputy Director. Currently, Christina is completing her PhD at Aarhus University where her research focuses on feminist notions of the human body within a context of investigative practice. She is a founding member and the chair of the board of Forensis: the Berlin-based association established by Forensic Architecture, and the co-founder and co-director of the Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIĀ). Her work on airstrikes, detention, right-wing, police, and border violence has been submitted to courts and other political forums, exhibited and awarded internationally..

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a writer and professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, UK and Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience was published by Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press in January 2024, Finalist for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2024, and long-listed for The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography in 2025. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London and France.

Layal Ftouni, is an assistant professor in gender studies and critical theory at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the recipient of the Dutch Research Council Veni grant (2021–25) for the research project entitled “Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival.” The monograph explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine. She works across the fields/areas of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political theory, critical theory, and critical race studies. 

Robert Barsky is a Professor of Humanities and of Law at Vanderbilt University. The author of 10 books, including a collection of poetry and a novel, he works at the intersection of narrative and law. His work relating to Noam Chomsky and his milieus, and his engagement with homeless and Refugee populations, reflect his interest in the intersections of language, power, and storytelling as they relate to vulnerable populations.

Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where her research and teaching focus on questions of immigration, citizenship, culture and identity. She is the Director of the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley and is an affiliated faculty member of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for European Studies, the Othering and Belonging LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award, and the Professor Keith Aoki Asian Pacific American Jurisprudence Award. Volpp is the coeditor of Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (2019) and Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (2006). Her writing has been widely published in journals including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, Citizenship Studies, PMLA, Law, Culture, and Humanities, differences, Critical Analysis of Law, and many others.

Cathy Park Hong a is Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science in the Department of English. Hong is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, including Translating Mo'um, Dance Dance Revolution, and Engine Empire. Her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) was both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list, as well as a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her B.A. from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, she was on the faculty at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program for poetry.

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His most recent book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making, and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. This interplay between landscapes and human subjectivity is evident in the ways that she uses her own body to reimagine black people’s relationships to the complex social and natural landscapes in which they live. She has shown work at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, the Photographic Center Northwest, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, Spain) , the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Fototeca de Havana, the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), JACK (Brooklyn), SOMArts (SF), C3A (Córdoba, Spain), A.I.R. Gallery, Performance Space New York, and the Berkeley Art Center. She is a national member of the AIR Gallery and an alumna of The Austin Project, founded by Omi Jones and facilitated by Sharon Bridgforth.

Iggy Cortez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art. He is currently at work on a book project that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).

Deniz Göktürk holds a Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin and is a professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the Department of Film & Media. She works on cultural and media studies with a focus on moving images, documentary forms, polyglott literature, and theories of migration, social interaction, and aesthetic intervention in a global horizon. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, numerous articles and edited volumes on transnational migration, culture, and cinema. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, expanded 2nd edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming from De Gruyter. She is also working on a project on Poetic Truth in Documentary Cinema and has been co-curating film series on Documentary Voices at BAMPFA. She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the UC Berkeley German Department’s electronic journal (since 2005).

Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Stephanie specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Over the last decade, Stephanie has focused her research on the migration and coming-of-age of unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico in the US. Stephanie’s first book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, brings together six years of research to tell the stories of unaccompanied migrant youth in Los Angeles, California.  

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in LA motivate her commitment to public scholarship. Stephanie’s research has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other public outlets. She aims to impact policy through her work as a Resident Scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a Research Consultant at UNICEF.