ENTR’ACTE 2026:

Women and Film History International is delighted to announce their third Entr'acte!

CREATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY

NOVEMBER 6, 2026 - 11 AM ET

NOVEMBER 7, 2026 - 1 PM ET/10 AM PT

AN ONLINE EVENT

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For our third edition of Entr’acte, we are again planning a two-day virtual program centered around the theme of “creative historiography.”

Our 2026 edition of Entr’acte continues WFHI’s mission to promote imaginative thinking and explore intersectional, global perspectives on women's historical labor in cinema. We are delighted to have assembled four scholars and three contemporary artists to help foster these discussions.

For Day 1, we are taking an open and experimental presentation-based approach to two words central to WFHI’s mission and our name: "woman” and "international.” Four contributors will present 10-minute flash talks centered on one of these words, followed by a group discussion and Q&A. We understand these words have complicated and contested meanings. As such, we encourage speakers to embrace their word with a heterogeneous approach to histories, concepts, challenges, and possibilities. The aim is to activate imaginative thinking from a feminist, historiographical perspective. We hope that the flash-talk format will allow speakers to present their ideas as they wish and in ways intended to spark new questions. Our desire is, above all, to complicate, question, and reframe these words. Day 1 will also include a presentation and conversation with artist Stacey Steers.

Day 2 will continue the focus on feminist creative practices, such as experimentation with silent film, archival images, and cultural history more broadly. We wish to draw the conversation into the present and future via new explorations with contemporary artists and artistic practices that have not been part of our network and focus thus far. Two artists will present and discuss their work in three 20-minute sessions, followed by a group discussion and Q&A.

Learn more about Entr'acte here.

SCHEDULE

Day 1: Friday 6th November - 11:00 ET (convert to your time zone here)

  • Dr. Leslie Kreiner Wilson serves as Professor of Film and Creative Writing at Pepperdine University, Executive Director at Americana, and Co-Principal of AMI Films. A scholar-activist, she focuses her research, writing, and publishing on women and leadership in early Hollywood. Her work has been published in such publications as  The Journal of Popular Film and Television; Journal of Screenwriting, Film History: An International Journal; Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television; The Popular Culture Studies Journal; Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance; Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and  Literature/Film Quarterly. Her book Madam Movie Mogul: Women and Leadership in Early Hollywood is forthcoming from Peter Lang.

  • Melika Motevallipoor is an Iranian filmmaker, author, and PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research explores gender, human performance, identity, and the politics of visibility in cinema, drawing on feminist film theory, performance studies, and research-creation. Her work examines how sociopolitical constraints shape cinematic expression and representations of women, while also investigating the intersections of artificial intelligence, human embodiment, and emerging audiovisual practices. Through both scholarly inquiry and filmmaking, she explores the evolving relationship between human performance, technological mediation, and cinematic representation. She is the author of The Art of Cinema (2025) and the recipient of the 2026 Graduate Student Essay Prize awarded by the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada.

  • Stacey Steers is known internationally for her process-driven, labor-intensive films comprising thousands of handmade works on paper. Her work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives. Stacey’s animated short films have been screened throughout the U.S. and abroad and have received numerous awards. Her work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New Directors New Films, New York, MoMA, The Lincoln Center, New York City, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Since 2011, Stacey has expanded her work to include collaborative installations that join invented, three-dimensional production elements with film loops, creating a new context for experiencing her films. Past solo exhibitions include the Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; BMoCA, Boulder, Colorado; and the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal. Stacey is a recipient of major grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and the American Film Institute. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. For more on her work, visit this website.

  • Prof. dr. Eliza Steinbock is a full professor in Transgender Studies, Art, and Cultural Activism at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University. Leading interdisciplinary research on inclusion practices and exclusion mechanisms in art, media, and heritage sectors, Steinbock focuses on minoritarian experiences of cultural participation. With publications conjoining the fields of trans studies and visual culture studies, their work can be found in Public, Feminist Review, Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, Art Journal, Journal for Visual Culture, Social Media + Society, Performance Matters, Feminist Media Studies, Angelaki, Journal of Homosexuality, and TSQ. Steinbock authored the award-winning book Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke UP, 2019) and most recently co-authored with Sandro Weilenmann Field Notes on Artistic Participation in Europe’s Trans and Queer Archives (Open Access, 2025).

  • Dr. Elena Susanna Weygandt analyzes and documents performance theories indigenous to Russia and East Europe that have not yet been documented. She draws on methods of interview and ethnography as well as digital display in her research on contemporary topics. In her book with the University of Wisconsin Press, From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Drama and Performance Theory in Contemporary Russia (2025), she identifies the main writers and performance theories of the vibrant movement, Novaia Drama, and situates this pioneering literature in the contemporary Russian literary canon, the Performance Studies field, and within Post-Soviet studies. The New Dramatists assert that it is precisely in the theatre, with its inherent form of critique and reflection provided by the stage, where the contemporary moment of the present can be held at arm's length away, which creates enough of a distance from the present for a historical perspective about it to emerge. This research has shaped her into a scholar and teacher of visual language, the body, feminist art, gender, exhibition on digital platforms, and all genres of documentary and realism in Russian and East European literature. Her publications on these topics of cultural history in Russia and East Europe from 1953 to the present appear in The Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, TDR: The Drama Review, Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, and in a co-edited anthology published by Columbia UP. She received her training in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton (PhD 2015; Graduate Certificate in History of Science 2015).

Day 2: Saturday, 7th November - 1pm ET / 10am PT (convert to your time zone here)

  • Ina Archer will be discussing her recent three-channel video installation Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show (2024), a work that underlines the ways in which visual technical advancements and technologies have been employed to facilitate — and in certain cases to render possible — the expression and dissemination of racial stereotypes and tropes.

    Archer is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist whose multimedia works and films have been shown across the United States. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow, a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and she has been awarded numerous residencies. Her work has been featured in solo shows at Microscope Galley, The Armory, Heidi Cho Gallery, and FVA Arts Interlude Video Wall Program. She is former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Ina earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a Master’s in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, early sound cinema and technology and she studied Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at UCLA (MIAS) and NYU (MIAP). Ina is also a regular contributor to Film Comment Magazine. She lives and works between Washington D.C. and Brooklyn, NY. Her full CV can be accessed here.

  • Courtney Stephens will be discussing her all-archival film/live performance Terra Femme (2017-2021), a work composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century.


    Stephens is the director of four feature films. The American Sector (with Pacho Velez) documents slabs of the Berlin Wall installed around the US. Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (with Michael Almereyda) explores the life of neuroscientist and psychedelics pioneer John C. Lilly, and Invention is a hybrid fiction film about a fringe healing device. The American Sector and Invention were named among The New Yorker's best films of the year. She has collaborated with writers including Eleni Sikelianos and Lucy Ives, the band Sparks, and the fashion brand Lemaire. Her films have been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, Fondazione Prada, Jeu de Paume, ICA London, in film festivals including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Locarno, Viennale, New Directors/New Films, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, and the New York Film Festival, and released theatrically in the US and France. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, and grants from the Sloan Foundation, California Humanities, the Mahindra Center for the Humanities, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has also co-curated the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, and organized film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Flaherty NYC, The Filmmaker's Cooperative, and Human Resources. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, BOMB, Filmmaker, MUBI Notebook, The New Inquiry, and Cabinet. She teaches at Occidental College.