New Directions in Turkish Film Studies XXII “Cinema and Woman” Keynote Speakers

XXII. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies Conference will take place on May 11-13, 2023, at Kadir Has University with the designated theme of “Cinema and Women.” The keynote speakers of this year’s conference are film producer Elhum Shakerifar and academic Patricia White.

Detailed information about our speakers is as follows:

Elhum Shakerifar

Elhum Shakerifar, who is a producer, curator, and writer, has been nominated for the BAFTA award and won the 2017 Women in Film & TV’s BBC Factual Award. She was also named one of Screen International’s 2018 #Brit50 Producers on the Rise. Shakerifar’s list of credits includes The Reluctant Revolutionary (Sean McAllister, 2012), The Runner (Saeed Farouky, 2013), A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015), Even When I Fall (Sky Neal and Kate McLarnon, 2017), Almost Heaven (Carol Salter, 2017), ISLAND (Steven Eastwood, 2017) and Of Love & Law (Hikaru Toda, 2017).

Shakerifar used to work for the Bird’s Eye View Film Festival from 2012 to 2014. She organized a project on Arab Women Directors in 2013 and curated a three-month screening program for the Canary Wharf Screen in 2014. Shakerifar, nominated for the Arab British Centre’s Award for Culture in 2017, currently serves as a program advisor for the London Film Festival. She is also a Film Curator for Shubbak, a festival that showcases contemporary Arab culture.

In addition to filmmaking and curation, in 2013, she published a photography book called The Grey Line (by Jo Metson Scott), which features U.S. and U.K. soldiers who have voiced their opposition to the Iraq War. The book received critical acclaim and was listed as one of the top photo books of 2013 by TIME, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. She is also a translator of published Persian poetry and recently translated a book of poems by Azita Ghahreman and Maura Dooley. The book was nominated for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2019.

Patricia White

Patricia White is a professor of Film and Media Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies coordinator at Swarthmore College. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her B.A. from Yale University in Film Studies.

White’s academic works include Rebecca (2021), Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015), and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999). She is also the co-author of The Film Experience (2021) and co-editor of Critical Visions in Film Theory; Classic and Contemporary Readings (2011).

While White’s essays on feminist and LGBTQ+ cinema have been published in prestigious academic journals, including Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, GLQ, and Screen, her work has also been featured in edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, Reframing Indie, Sisters in the Life, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, and Inside/Out, as well as in online platforms such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.

White currently serves on the boards of the non-profit feminist media arts organization Women Make Movies and Film Quarterly magazine. Additionally, she is a member of the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura and oversees the Camera Obscura book series for Duke University Press. Patricia is working on her latest book, which focuses on independent U.S. women’s filmmaking in the twenty-first century.