Rosa Barotsi is a lecturer and researcher based at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. She is currently heading a project on minoritized filmmaking cultures at the margins of the industry in Italy and beyond (IMFilm, 2022-2025). She was previously Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with CineAF: Women’s Films in Italy 1965-2015, a project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry. She trained at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in 2014. She has previously held a postdoctoral position at the ICI Berlin, where she developed a project on Slow Cinema and debt. Along with Clio Nicastro and Saima Akhtar, she co-founded the In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour research collective in 2016. She publishes work and organizes film programs that focus on the intersections between film, gender and labor, with an emphasis on Greek and Italian cinema. She was part of The Purple Meridians project (Eurimages Gender Equality Sponsorship 2020–2023) and the coordinator of #FeministFrames at the 65th Festival dei Popoli in Florence.
Zairong Xiang’s research, teaching, and curatorial practices engage with cosmology and cosmopolitanism in their culturally diverse, historically specific, and conceptually promiscuous manifestations in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl. He teaches literature and art at Duke Kunshan University, and was co-curator of the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial, Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and the 14th Shanghai Biennial Cosmos Cinema (2023-2024), among many other projects. He is curating an exhibition at Para-Site Hong Kong titled How to be Happy Together? (Dec. 2024); and co-curating (with Denise Ryner) a research and exhibition project at ICA Philadephia (2026). Author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books), he is the editor of exhibition catalogues, journal special issues, and a film archive. He is currently completing his second book on “transdualism.” Through the concept of “shanzhai/counterfeit,” he continues a multifaceted research into the artistic and intellectual exchanges in the Global South, especially between Latin America and China since the nineteenth century. Once a research fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University, he was twice the recipient of the EU Erasmus Mundus scholarship. All his writings and previous lectures can be accessed at www.xiangzairong.com
