The 2019 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL jury panel features an international cadre of critics, curators, and scholars: Valentino Catricalà, Marco De Mutiis, Stefano Locati, Henry Lowood, and Jenna NG.

Valentino Catricalà

Scholar, curator of contemporary art, and critic, Valentino Catricala received his PhD at the Roma Tre University, where he currently works as a Post Doc Researcher. He is also a researcher and coordinator of the Art and Media programs at the Fondazione Mondo Digitale and is artistic director of the Media Art Festival of Rome (MAXXI). He has carried out research in important centers such as the Karlsruhe ZKM, the Tate Modern, the University of Dundee. Catricalà investigates the relationship between art, technology, and filmmaking. He has written several essays published in books and academic journals and has participated in international conferences. He is the author of the book Media Art. Art perspectives towards the 21st century. Stories, theories, preservation (Mimesis, 2016), Catricalà is the curator of the Creative Europe project ENLIGHT for SPECTRA Festival (Aberdeen), Media Art Festival (Rome), Article Biennale (Stavanger).

Marco de Mutiis

Marco De Mutiis is an artist working with different media and technologies and with an interest in issues of perception and communication. Often re­-engineering and transforming old analog and mechanical  devices,  De Mutiis  creates  kinetic installations that concern with communication, language and physicality. Graduated with distinction from the MFA program at the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), he has shown his works internationally in festivals and galleries. He has been the recipient of the Bloomberg Digital Arts Initiative in 2013. He has worked as a senior research associate and part-time lecturer at City University of Hong Kong and he is currently working as Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur. He is currently working on his PdD at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland and IULM University in Milan.

Stefano Locati

Stefano Locati is a Teaching Assistant at IULM University in Milan. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival in Venice, Italy and the Co-Director of the Asian Film Festival in Bologna. Locati received his Doctorate in Literature and Media: Narrative Theory and Languages. His research focuses on transmedia storytelling and Asian cinema. He is the author of Il nuovo cinema di Hong Kong: Sguardi dopo l’hand-over (2014, with Emanuele Sacchi) and Evolution. Darwin and Cinema (2014, with Elena Canadelli). He is currently working on a new book on Asian cinema.

HENRY LOWOOD

Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima. Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli.

JENNA NG

Jenna NG is an Anniversary Research Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York, in the UK where she designed and taught a wide range of cinema and digital media courses, including convening and teaching the module, "Coding the Frame: Space and Time with Digital Media", for the Screen Media and Cultures MPhil at Cambridge, and supervised several MPhil essays and theses. Jenna NG works primarily on theoretical, cultural and critical analyses intersecting digital and visual culture, with particular interests in the imaging technologies of CGI, mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her research interests also include the philosophy of technology, the posthuman, computational culture and the digital humanities. Among her many publications, she edited Understanding Machinima, Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds published in 2013 by Bloomsbury.