About The Video Essays Guide

Estrella Sendra is a scholar, teacher, filmmaker, journalist and festival organiser, currently working as Senior Teaching Fellow in Film and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London; and as Teaching Fellow in Global Media Industries, at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She engages with creative and innovative teaching methods, informed by her research and practical experience in the creative industries. Her research interests include festival studies, film festivals, global screen media, African cinema, audiovisual representations of migration, transnational communities, cultural contributions from rooted cosmopolitans, and gender. Since 2011, when she directed Témoignages de l’autre côté / Testimonials from the other side (2011), an awarded documentary film about migration, she has been developing a regional expertise in Senegal, with regular research periods in the country. In 2018, she completed her PhD in African Languages and Cultures at SOAS. This traces, for the first time, the history of festivalisation in Senegal, and focused on a music festival in a rural region, the Festival International de Folklore et de Percussion (FESFOP) in Louga. Her publications include ‘Displacement and the Quest for Identity in Alain Gomis’ Cinema’ in Black Camera: an International Film Journal (2018). She was the director of the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2014, and 2015, as well as part of the curatorial team until 2019, and has been involved in further festivals in Spain, Senegal, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Bartolomeo Meletti is the Education and Research Executive of Learning on Screen, a membership organisation specialised in the use of moving image and sound in education. He also works as Creative Director for CREATe, the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre at the University of Glasgow. In this capacity, he has led the development of CopyrightUser.org, an independent online platform intended to make UK copyright law accessible to everyone. Bartolomeo is also the Director of Worth Knowing Production, a digital creative team specialised in making complex knowledge accessible to everyone through research-based visual tools.

Previously, Bartolomeo worked at the British Film Institute and the Digital Catapult on secondment from CREATe, and held research and media production positions at CIPPM, the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (Bournemouth University), where he is currently a Visiting Fellow; and at CEMP, the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (Bournemouth University).

In 2015, and alongside Professor Ronan Deazley, Bartolomeo received the Arts and Humanities Research Councils (AHRC) Award for Innovation in Film. This was for their work 'The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair', the first episode in 'The Game is On!' webseries.