Justine Peres Smith
Justine Smith is a writer and film programmer based in Montreal, QC. She is the screen editor for Cult MTL and has contributed to publications like Hyperallergic, Little White Lies and Ebert Voices. She is the programmer for the Underground Section at the Fantasia International Film Festival and is on the programming committee for Cinéma Moderne in Montreal.
Kali Simmons
Kali Simmons (Oglala Lakota) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside. She has taught classes on Indigenous film and media and her research explores the history of Indigenous representation in American and Canadian horror films. Her work on Indigenous media practices has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Karen Arthur
Karen Arthur is an American film director, producer, and actress. She has directed the feature films Legacy (1975), The Mafu Cage (1978) and Lady Beware (1987), but the majority of her work has been in television, where she has had a long and prolific career directing television films and series, including a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series (for an episode of Cagney & Lacey).
Karen Herland
Karen Herland fell in with a bad crowd with a taste for horror at a young age. Currently, her research focuses on the social and cultural construction and marginalization of bodies considered threatening or challenging to traditional norms. She is a Co-Director of Montreal’s Monstrum Society and sits on the Monstrum Journal’s editorial board. She has taught at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies since 2012. Amongst her recent publications are “ ‘Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine’: Sound and Fury in The Snake Pit” in Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema (2014) and “Horror and the Last Frontier: Monstrous Borders and Bodies” in Firefly and Westworld.” Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond.(2019), A lecturer in popular/visual culture and sexuality studies at Concordia University, she has been involved in teaching their interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS for more than a decade and has served as the Director of the university’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series.
Katarzyna Ancuta
Dr. Katarzyna Ancuta is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Katarzyna is the author of Where Angels Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror (2005) and her most recent publications include contributions to B-Movie Gothic (2018), Twenty-First-Century Gothic (2019), Gothic and the Arts (2019), The New Urban Gothic (2020) and The Transmedia
Vampire. Katarzyna co-edited three special journal issues on Thai and
Southeast Asian horror film and Tropical Gothic and two edited collections: Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2018) and South Asian Gothic (2021) and is currently co-editing a similar volume on Southeast Asian Gothic and a journal special issue on Asian Gothic.
Kate Robertson
Kate Robertson is an Australian writer and academic based in New York. She writes about art, film and culture for a range of publications, including Senses of Cinema, The Atlantic, i-D, Vice, and Complex. Her first book, Identity, Community & Australian Artists, 1890-1914 Paris, London and Further Afield came out late-2019 with Bloomsbury Academic and her second, Trouble Every Day, is due out with Auteur in 2020. She is an affiliate of the University of Sydney, Australia, where she completed her dissertation and taught for several years.
Kelly Boner
Kelly Boner (born Kelly Schmader) is a visual and performance artist residing in Chicago, IL. She received her BA in studio art from Oberlin College in 2009, and her Master of Arts Management in 2019. She designed and taught the pilot semesters of “Creative Communities: The Art of Drag” at Columbia College Chicago, a course that explores the nature of drag as both a community artform and form of artistic gender expression, with a focus on media literacy as it pertains to digital drag and video performance. Her academic and artistic relationship with the telephone as a source of horror is reflected in a postcard she submitted to the website PostSecret when she was 16 that simply stated “I’m afraid to answer the telephone.”
Ken Johnson
Ken Johnson grew up in Maine and graduated from Brown University in 1976 with a B.A. in art. He earned a master’s degree in studio art with a concentration in painting at the State University of New York at Albany in 1977. For the next five years he worked as a technician in the painting department of an art conservation laboratory operated by the New York State Department of Historic Sites in Waterford, NY. In 1983, he started writing art reviews for the Albany Times Union newspaper and for other local publications in the Albany, NY region where he lived from 1977 to 2001 (in Troy from the early ‘80s on). In 1987 he began writing articles on contemporary artists for the now defunct Arts Magazine, and a year later he moved on to Art in America magazine for which he wrote reviews and articles regularly for the next nine years. In 1997 he began writing reviews for The New York Times, and continued to do so until September 2006, when he took a job as the chief art critic for the Boston Globe. After a year in Boston, he returned to New York and to writing art criticism for the Times, continuing to do so until October 2016. In 2011, his book “Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art” was published by Prestel Books. In 2013, he began producing an online comic called “Ball and Cone” (ballandcone.tumblr.com). “Ball and Cone” was listed among “Notable Comics” in “The Best American Comics of 2016.” (see here http://on-panel.com/BAC2016/index.html) Now he devotes most of his time to painting: https://www.instagram.com/ball_and_cone_/?hl=en
He has lived in Flushing, Queens since 2001.
Kevin Lafferty
Kevin Lafferty grew up in Pasadena. Despite this setback, he moved to Santa Barbara to study marine biology in 1981, where he remains. To his mother’s embarrassment, he is not a real doctor. Rather, as a parasitologist (not to be confused with a parapsychologist) he studies the role of parasites in natural ecosystems. He is a senior scientist at the USGS, and adjunct professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he influences well-adjusted young minds to find beauty in things like the black fingers of death or raccoon latrines. His academic achievements include receiving the Ward Medal for Parasitology, authoring over 200 scientific publications, and being one of the 10 most cited parasitologists. None of this helps him get a window table or invitations to dinner parties.
Kier-La Janisse
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, former programmer, and founder of horror school The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and contributed to Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (2015), We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (2017) and Refocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published (via her imprint Spectacular Optical) the anthology books Kid Power! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror was released by Severin Films in 2021.