MAXAMBA

Suzanne Barnard is Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, a filmmaker, and a licensed clinical psychologist. She received her Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology from Loyola University of Chicago, and completed postdoctoral studies at Georgetown University. She is coeditor,
with Bruce Fink, of Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, and has published widely on Lacanian, French feminist, and Foucauldian approaches to the body and subjectivity. She also writes in film theory (focused on Deleuzean approaches to cinema, affect and subjectivity), and has presented on the film work of Pedro Costa, Ben Russell, and John Akomfrah. Her research engages psychology, philosophy, film, and ethnography, and she has taught courses on Deleuze and collaborative aesthetics, on psychology, migration and “slow cinema,” and on the posthuman in science fiction film. She received a grant from Duquesne’s Center for African Studies to create a course on global identities and African cinema, in tandem with which she curated an African Film Series in Spring 2015. She has been a video consultant for The REP Professional Theatre Company (Pittsburgh). Her film work has been supported by the Heinz Foundation, Binaural Media, the Women and Girls Foundation and Duquesne University. She is recently the recipient, along with Christopher McCann, of an NEH Endowment Grant for a film project now in preproduction (working title: “Breath and Folding: An Ethnographic Film on Cosmologies of Air, Light, and Space”).

Sofia Borges is a researcher and visual artist. She works in relation to local communities, politics and in the media of installation and film. She studied Painting and Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Ar.Co. She received her M.F.A. in Curatorial Studies from the University of Lisbon, where she focused on the collaborative process in the visual arts and film. Beginning in 2006, she worked in the Quinta da Vitória neighborhood of Lisbon (until its final demolition in 2014), where she coordinated and performed research, documentation and artistic projects, involving the local residents and other disciplines, including Anthropology, Cinema, Architecture and Botany. “A Festa Acabou”/ “The Party is Over” project worked on the imagination and narrative created by the inhabitants and the public space. She showed this project in Quinta da Vitória’s neighborhood with the support of its inhabitants, as well as in the “Underconstrution” exhibition commissioned by Mónica Miranda and Paul Goodwin. During the neighborhood’s demolition, she started the “Colecção Jardins da Vitória”/ “Vitory Gardens Collection,” a collaborative, public art installation located near this neighborhood. This installation was created with trees and plants donated by the residents of the Quinta da Vitória. Her work has been supported by the ÁFRICA.Cont (2015), Duquesne University (- 2015), Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2013), Municipality of Loures (2012-13), DGA- Ministry of Culture (2008), Municipality of Oliveira do Hospital (2008) and the Orient Foundation (2001).