Prof. Ivone Margulies’ book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema was reviewed by Katie Kirkland and published in The Drama Review, Volume 64, Number 3, Fall 2020 (T247), pp. 181-183.

About the Book:
Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini’s proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verité experiments, a heightened self-critique in France and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late fifties. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star’s iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia her Own Story and the docudrama Torero!).

Heidi Boisvert joins this year’s New Inc member cohort in the Creative Science cohort. She co-founded XTH, an open-source biowearable startup, and after creating “ICED: I Can End Deportation,” the first 3D social change game, and “America 2049,” an alternate reality game about pluralism, Heidi founded futurePerfect lab to develop imaginative, playful emerging media projects with social justice organizations. The lab harnesses the power of pop culture, emerging technology, and neuroscience to ignite culture change by working in creative partnership with non-profits to engineer their messages for mass appeal.

Heidi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center and an research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. At present, she is developing the first media genome: an open-source biometric lab and AI system to isolate the narrative ingredients that move us to act.

Prof. Ricardo Miranda joins this year’s New Inc member cohort in the Art & Code track. He has developed a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination at an early age. In his creative and pedagogical work, themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of commodification/monetization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors.

He also received a CUNY Research in the Classroom Idea Grant. The award provides Research Foundation funds for a future course tentatively titled “XR: Speculative Media”.