About Us | CineMobilia

CineMobilia digitising equipment.

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What is CineMobilia?

Funded through a Canada Foundation for Innovation Grant, CineMobilia is located at York University and is a mobile research lab -- designed to be a flexible, responsive infrastructure tailored to the unique archival needs of Canadian marginalized communities. Specifically, the lab works with collections with limited staff, those with difficulty making their collections represented and discoverable, and/or collections that represent an underserved/underrepresented group or community.

In traveling to these communities, CineMobilia enables access to preservation and digitization technologies. Through partnerships with academic institutions, archives, memory institutions, and communities, CineMobilia's research is multidisciplinary, manifesting applied forms generalizable to other archival situations, creating opportunities for knowledge exchange, public presentation and digital dissemination.

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Our Sponsors

Vtape

LIFT

Archives of Ontario

Arquives: Canada’s LGBT2Q+ Archives

NFB

York University

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Become a Partner

CineMobilia is focused on the audio-visual heritage of Indigenous and Black peoples, women, and the LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. If you have materials related to these topics please contact us so that we can discuss how we can work with you.

Our Team

The people who make Cinemobilia happen.

Janine Marchessault

Primary Investigator

Professor in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design

York University

Janine Marchessault is Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University, and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research engages with the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR). She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group. Her latest project is an expanded cinema project, Outer Worlds (outerworlds.org) – commissioning five IMAX films by artists, which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 and will begin touring soon.

She is the Director of Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada's Moving Image Heritage (2018–2024 counterarchive.ca), a research collaboration involving more than 20 community and artist run archives devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ2+, immigrant, and women's communities. Her most recent monograph is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Ecologies, Utopias (MIT 2017) and co-edited collection Process Cinema: Handmade film in the Digital Age (MQUP 2019).

Jean-Pierre Marchant

Director of Operations

Jean-Pierre Marchant, Director of Operations. JP is a filmmaker and graduate of the York MFA program in Film and Media Studies. He has worked as a video editor and colourist for many years, and has taught various workshops and classes at York University and other institutions.

His works have screened and won awards in several festivals and art galleries including Photophobia in Hamilton, ON, Trinity Square Video, the Calgary International Film Festival, WNDX, the Winnipeg, Montreal and Toronto Underground Film Fests, Antimatter [Media Art], International Portrait Film Festival, Galvanized Suns, and the Northwest Film Fest.

Patricio Dávila

Co-Applicant

Associate Professor in Design

OCAD University

Patricio Dávila is a designer, artist, and educator. He is currently Associate Professor in Design at OCAD University, Co-director of Public Visualization Lab, and a member of the OCADU Mobile Media Lab and Visual Analytics Lab. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for examining data visualization as assemblages of subjectivation and power.

In his creative practice he has created mobile applications, locative media projects, essay videos, new media installations, and participatory community projects including: Powers of Kin, Chthuluscene, Tent City Projections, The Line, and In The Air Tonight. His curatorial projects, including Multiplex and Diagrams of Power, investigate the essay film, data, and critical media practices. His research and practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in the visualization of spatial issues with a specific focus on urban experiences, mobile technologies, and large-scale interactive public installations.

Public Visualization Studio Website

Public Visualization Lab Website

Public Visualization Lab Facebook Page

John Greyson

Co-Applicant

John Greyson is an award-winning Toronto video/film artist. Since 1984, his many features, shorts and transmedia works use humour and song to explore such queer activist issues as police entrapment, prison, AIDS activism, global solidarity, homo-nationalism and apartheid.

The winner of 4 Teddies, 4 Canadian screen awards, and Best Film Prizes in over 30 international festivals, his works include: Photo Booth (2022), International Dawn Chorus Day (2020), Mercurial (2018), Gazonto (2016), Murder in Passing (2013), Fig Trees (2009), Proteus (2003), Lilies (1996), Zero Patience (1993), The Making of Monsters (1991) and Urinal (1989).

Nada El-Omari

Artist-in-Residence

BFA in Film Production and MFA in Film

York University

Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal, Quebec. She has centered her practice and research interests on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and the stories of belonging and identity through a poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound and image, Nada explores different ways to self-narrate new ways to speak hybridity and self.

Her films have recently been shown at Images Festival, Arab Film & Media Institute NYC, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Les Instants Vidéos, NYU’s Orphan Films Symposium, Belfast Film Festival, Palestine Cinema Days, Visions Cairo, Toronto Palestine Film Festival and on Shasha and Tenk. Her work has also been published in Montreal Serai and qumra journal. She is currently displaying a digital project commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario (on view at:1-home.net) in collaboration with Sonya Mwambu. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and MFA in Film from York University.

Social Media

Website

Andrew Bailey

Knowledge Mobilization Officer

Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow

York University

Andrew Bailey is a Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow with York University, Archive/Counter-Archive, and Public Journal. He recently earned his Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture at York University with a dissertation focused on formalism and videogame art. Andrew currently teaches game studies and new media art history in the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University. Additionally, Andrew is the current Section Head of Essays for First Person Scholar (The Games Institute/the University of Waterloo) and Co-Vice Editor for Press Start Journal (the University of Glasgow). His writing has been recently published in the Videogame Art Reader, Critical Distance, Loading: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, and Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Literature.

Dr. Antoine Damiens

Project Manager

Postdoctoral Researcher York University

York University

Dr. Antoine Damiens is the Project Manager for Archive/Counter-Archive and a research associate at York University. Antoine Damiens's research examines the cultural impact of LGBTQ film festivals, the role played by research-creation and research-curation in academic knowledge production, and the importance of minoritized archives. He is the author of LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and After (with Marijke de Valck, Palgrave, 2023).

Rarara

Film/Video Technician

Rara is a film nerd. He loves to mess with film, hand develop it, scratch it, drag it on the ground, and colour it. He loves to work with different film families. He loves to do cinematography and to direct films.

Eva Phillips

Film/Video Technician

Eva is a filmmaker and artist from Calgary, Alberta currently based in Toronto, Ontario. She is going into her forth year of Film Production at York University in pursuit of a BFA. Currently, Eva is primarily interested in the recovery of “home movies” working across various forms of media such as miniDV, super8 and early digital cameras. She aims to create larger works with her family archives that explore a deeper sense of nostalgia and the human condition. Eva looks forward to working with CineMobilia.