Claudia Maria Acosta
Claudia Maria Acosta is a recent graduate of the University of Florida, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Women’s Studies. In 2017, she founded a zine librarians’ committee within the Travis Fristoe Zine Library in the Civic Media Center—home to one of the largest zine collections in the Southeast United States. She has co-organized zine fairs across the state of Florida, including the 2018 GNV Zine Fest, Miami Zine Fair (MZF) 2019 and the upcoming MZF 2020, and has participated in alternative print communities as an organizer, D.I.Y archivist, and zine creator herself. She is dedicated to the democratizing and decolonizing of archives, zine librarianship, and alternative literature. She currently works with the Miami-Dade Public Library as a Special Collections Assistant and will begin graduate school in the fall of 2020 to study library science.
Allison Bannister
Allison Bannister is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she studies multimodal comics composition and design. She holds an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies and her comics can be found in a variety of small press publications, including the Ignatz Award nominated feminist monster anthology Wayward Sisters.
Neal Curtis
Neal Curtis is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Auckland. He is the author of a number of books including Sovereignty and Superheroes (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Jason D. DeHart
Jason D. DeHart is an assistant professor of reading education at Appalachian State University. DeHart’s research interests include multimodal texts, graphic novels, and adolescent literacy.
Mita Mahato
Mita Mahato is a Seattle-based cut paper, collage, and comix artist and educator whose work focuses on lost, discarded, and disappeared animals and objects. Her book of poetry comix, In Between, is listed in The Best American Comics: The Notable Comics of 2019 and her silent comic book “Sea” received the award for “Best Comic Book of 2017” from Cartoonists Northwest. Her work is published in ANMLY, Coast/No Coast, Shenandoah, Illustrated PEN, MUTHA, Drunken Boat, and Seattle Weekly and has been exhibited widely (including at SOIL Gallery, Seattle; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Schnitzer Art Museum, Pullman; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans). Mahato is Associate Curator of Public and Youth Programs at the Henry Art Gallery, serves on the organizing board for the arts organization Short Run Seattle, and teaches community art workshops to all ages.
Carolina Martins
Carolina Martins is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Programme of Materialities of Literature of the University of Coimbra, where she is currently developing a thesis called “Augmented Reading: spatial combinations in graphic narrative installations”, for which she idealised and produced the installation VAST/O, with artists Natalie Woolf and Joāo Carola. She is also a contemporary dance producer. You can find more about her on www.carolinamartins.space.
Tim Posada
Tim Posada is the chair of journalism and new media at Saddleback College. His writings have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Palgrave Communications, and volumes on film and television. He is currently working on a book for Lexington Books/Fortress Academic on depictions of the body and soul. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Claremont Graduate University, writing his dissertation on contemporary superhero media. He also serves as film columnist for the Beverly Press.
Anastasia Salter
Anastasia Salter is an Associate Professor of Games and Interactive Media and Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida, and author of: What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press, August 2014), Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, August 2014, with John Murray); Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (Bloomsbury, April 2017); Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2017, with Bridget Blodgett); and Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, February 2020, with Aaron Reed and John Murray).
Elaine Sponholtz
Elaine Sponholtz is an artist-scholar whose research concerns the intersection of storytelling, social memory, and creative uses of technology. Dr. Sponholtz holds a B.A. in Communication Design from Florida State University, where she studied design. After working as a jewelry designer, she returned to academia to earn an MLIS, as well as a Master’s in Digital Arts and Sciences. Her thesis project, an original play set in nineteenth-century Florida, was the first to be performed at the University of Florida Digital Worlds Institute. In 2015, she was awarded a FLAS Fellowship to study in Prague, as well as the University of Florida’s Graduate School’s Doctoral Research Travel Award to conduct dissertation research in film institutes and archives in Europe. She completed a doctorate in Mass Communications in 2017 from UF’s College of Journalism and Communications. Her dissertation focused on four trailblazing artist-animators and how their innovations laid the groundwork for digital media.
Tomasz Żaglewski
Tomasz Żaglewski is a PhD in the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). He is an author of many comics-related academic papers published in the most important Polish art and social sciences journals. Recently his papers were published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and International Journal of Comic Art. His main academic interest is in regard to superhero narratives as a transmedia and transcultural phenomenon. In 2017 he published the very first Polish monograph about a modern comic book film: “Kinowe uniwersum superbohaterów. Analiza współczesnego filmu komiksowego” (“Superheroes’ Cinematic Universe: Analyzing a Modern Comic Book Film”) through the PWN Group publisher. In 2018 he presented papers at the University of Florida’s “ImageTech: Comics and Materiality” conference and at the “Superheroes Beyond” conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.