BA / MA Media
Dr Valentina Signorelli
Website: http://daitona.it/en/
Dr Valentina Signorellli (PhD Film) is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader BA Media and Communication. She is also a practitioner, specialising in transmedia storytelling and production including, but not limited to fiction and non-fiction films, TV, advertising and VR. Her works have been screened internationally, including the prestigious Venice Biennale. She is one of the co-founders of Daitona, recently awarded as the most innovative production company of 2018.
Alexander
Thomas
Alexander Thomas is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Media Production. He is also a screenwriter and film director. His short films have won numerous awards and his last film, Beverley, was longlisted for the 2017 Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Live Action Short.
As well as filmmaking Alexander has an active research interest in the ethics of transhumanism in the era of advanced capitalism. He has published articles and book reviews related to this subject and was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.
Dr Julia
Dane
Course Leader Dr Julia Dane teaches in the field of advertising, media and cultural theory, with her research interests in identity, celebrity, social media influencer marketing and digital fandom.
Dr Tony D.
Sampson
Dr Tony D Sampson is a reader and the Course Leader for the MA in Media Communication Industries at UEL. He is a critical theorist with an interest in philosophies of media technology, digital cultures, experience design, neurocultures and affect theory. His publications include The Spam Book, Virality, The Assemblage Brain and Affect and Social Media. His latest book – A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media –was published by Polity in June, 2020. Tony is the host and organiser of the Affect and Social Media conferences in east London and a co-founder of the public engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group.
Dr Andrew
Branch
Dr Andrew Branch is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication. His teaching and research is invested in making sense of the workings of the creative industries, held up as drivers of progressive social and economic change by successive governments intent on superintending them. Drawing primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Andrew is interested in how workers in these industries negotiate the complex relations between commercial imperatives and creative practice. He situates this interest in the wider context of examining how subjectivities are formed, embodied, negotiated, and captured in media discourses. To this end, he leads modules on aesthetics and technologies; convergent media industries; experimental documentary (undergraduate); and media and communication industries (postgraduate). He also supervises dissertation students. In order to realise the impact of this research, he co-founded, along with his colleagues, Dr Tony Sampson (UEL) and Giles Tofield (Cultural Engine), the Cultural Engine Research Group (CERG), which works with marginalised communities and groups, securing funding to study how specific sites of incubation frame social reproduction.