EDITORS & CONTRIBUTORS

Editors

VALERIE PIRES is a New Yorker whose work resides in spaces of fiction and nonfiction. An investigative journalist, documentary photographer, and filmmaker, she primarily works in social documentary. After years in broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking in the U.S. and abroad, she earned a B.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and, in 2024, will pursue an M.A. in Journalism, Arts & Culture at the Columbia School of Journalism.

KAVEH JALINOUS is a filmmaker, screenwriter, musician, and freelance journalist specializing in film and television based in NYC. He is currently finishing a B.A. in Film & Media Studies and French & Francophone Studies at Columbia University and is working on three television series, a short film, and his band’s debut album. He enjoys taking long walks with no destination and learning languages in his free time.

Contributors

ANNETTE INSDORF is a Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and Moderator of the popular "Reel Pieces" series at Manhattan's 92Y, where she has interviewed 300 film celebrities. She is the author of the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel); Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director's work; Philip Kaufman, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, currently in its fourth printing.

BEHRANG GARAKANI is an Iranian-American technologist and media scholar who held development, creative, and executive roles at Electronic Arts and The Walt Disney Company. He resides in New York City and is a member of the technology team at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists, he also contributes to a multiyear initiative tasked with reimagining NASA's Voyager Golden Record for its 50th anniversary in 2027. As a patented inventor of interactive media, his critical artworks have been recognized by the National Gallery of Art and The New York Times. In September 2024, Garakani will teach a course on the video essay at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. 

BREIXO VIEJO has extensively written about independent and avant-garde cinema, works translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. He is the author of Música moderna para un nuevo cine: Eisler, Adorno y el Film Music Project (Madrid: Akal, 2008), and co-edited with Jo Evans Luis Buñuel: Correspondencia escogida (Madrid: Cátedra, 2018), which was awarded Best Book of the Year by the Spanish Academy of Motion Pictures, and translated as Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Viejo is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communications, Hofstra University, New York. Prior to Hofstra, Viejo was a full-time term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York.

ZACHARY LEE (he/him) is from Chicago's North Side and serves as managing editor at the Center for Public Justice, an assistant editor for Think Christian, and a news reporter for Sojourners. He is a culture writer whose work can be found at RogerEbert.com, The Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, and Dread Central. On X at @zacharoni22 and Letterboxd at @zlee729.