Alice Diop in Person at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Alice Diop is a French filmmaker and screenwriter of Senegalese heritage, born in 1979 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis. After studying history and visual sociology, she trained in documentary filmmaking at La Fémis, France’s leading film school. She began directing in 2005 with La Tour du monde, followed by documentaries including La Mort de Danton (2011), Vers la tendresse (2016), and Nous (2020), which examine questions of identity, social belonging, migration, and life in the Parisian suburbs. 

Diop made her fiction debut with Saint Omer (2022), which received the Grand Jury Prize and the Lion of the Future for Best Debut Film at the Venice Film Festival, as well as the César Award for Best First Film in 2023. Her work has established her as an important voice in contemporary French cinema, combining documentary approaches with a close attention to individual experience and broader social histories. 

Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French and Director of Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She is affiliated with Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender,  the Institute of European Studies and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.  Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; race and postcolonial studies; aesthetics and biopolitics;  postwar French and Francophone culture; transcultural memory studies. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley’s highest recognition for teaching.  Her most recent book, Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at the Edges of Europe (forthcoming with Fordham in 2025) addresses migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis, and was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She currently serves as a co-PI (with Judith Butler, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Shannon Jackson) on a Mellon grant for A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times

Assistant Professor of Film and Media, Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; epistemologies of the global; the visual and sensory dimensions of digital media; minoritarian aesthetics; cinema’s relation to other media; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, Discourse, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023). 

Maya has been teaching as a lecturer in the department since the fall of 2016. She completed her PhD in French/Francophone Studies at Northwestern University, and has been published in Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Editions de la Sorbonne, and The Women Film Pioneers Project. She is currently writing a book on Alice Diop. 

Damon Young is co-appointed with the department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies, the Department of Rhetoric and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory. His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies, published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press,  examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s.