Dr Isobel Harbison (Convenor) is an Irish art historian, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first book, Performing Image, was published by the MIT Press in 2019, and her second book will be out soon with MUP. She has published widely on the topic of artists’ and independent film in the north of Ireland from 1968, and programmed related events for Tate Modern, IMMA and the Belfast Film Festival. From 2025 – 2026 she has been Research Associate at the IMMA to develop an extensive oral history with international artists and filmmakers active in the north of Ireland from 1968 – 1990 called Recording History, to be held at PRONI. Her research informs a forthcoming book. More info here.
Alastair Herron is from Belfast. With Kate McManus he has produced wide-ranging community media programmes and documentaries in West Belfast. They went on to establish Community Media, with Dave and Marilyn Hyndman. In the 1980s, he established the Belfast Film Workshop (BFW) and (with Frontroom Productions) made Acceptable Levels for Channel 4. In 1992, Herron began lecturing at Ulster University. Since leaving the university, he has established an international digital publishing house with colleagues from the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland and the UK.
John Davies is a London-based filmmaker originally from Leicestershire. He started making films at art college in the early 1970s going on to study film & TV at the Royal College of Art. He then established Frontroom Films where he worked as a producer, director and editor. Films that he made in Ireland in the 1980s are Maeve (as co-director and editor, with Pat Murphy and Robert Smith, BFI 1981) and Acceptable Levels (director, with Frontroom Films and Belfast Film Workshop, 1983).
Ellin Hare is a filmmaker based in Durham. In the 1980s she worked for the BBC as an editor, made short films, and was a member of Frontroom Productions, co-writing and editing Acceptable Levels (1983) before joining Amber Films in Newcastle. She has worked on the development and editing of all of Amber’s feature films and many of the documentaries. She co-directed T Dan Smith (1987) and directed Dream On (1991), The Scar (1997) and Like Father (2001). Her films have won multiple awards including Prix Europa and Prix Futura. In 2008 she directed The Pursuit of Happiness screened on Chanel 4 and, most recently, What Happened Here (2023). She was a working member of the Amber Film collective until 2024.
Alastair (Aly) Renwick was born in Scotland in 1944 and joined the British Army at sixteen years of age. He served in West Germany; Thailand (during the Vietnam War); in Kenya, Cyprus and Northern Ireland (before the conflict). He left the army in late 1968 and moved to London to help organise the anti-Vietnam War protests. From 1969, Renwick helped establish various campaign organisations including the Troops Out Movement (TOM). He has taken part in peace and reconciliation work since the 1960s. Renwick is currently producing an Activists’ Archive of the Troops Out Movement (TOM) with the MayDay Room, London.
Chris Reeves is a filmmaker based in London. He studied at Central St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art’s Film School. He co-founded Platform Films in 1982 to make The Cause of Ireland for Channel 4, which won the Tyne Award in 1984. Platform went on to make a five-part labour history series The People’s Flag, and Proud Arabs and Texan Oilmen, also for Channel 4, among other films for broadcast and cinema. He directed inserts to BBC2’s disability magazine programme From the Edge, and a series on the life and death of a young disabled homeless man Who Killed Mark Faulkner? Chris was a founder member of the London Socialist Film Co-op which screened annual series of progressive films from 1989 to 2020.
Anne Crilly is an artist and filmmaker from Derry, based in Donegal. She was a founding member of the Derry Film and Video Workshop (DFVW) in 1983, a women-led group that explored the women’s movement and how it coincided with ‘the national question’ in the north of Ireland. After her film Stop Strip Searching (1984 and 1986), Crilly went on to direct Mother Ireland (1988) which was recognised internationally for its representation of the Irish women’s movement. In 2024, DFVW had an exhibition with Sara Greavu and Ciara Phillips at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (We Realised the Power of It). Her work, Stop Strip Searching, will be shown at de Appel Amsterdam as part of their forthcoming exhibition, the state of us (2026).
Margo Harkin is a filmmaker based in Derry. She studied at the Ulster College of Art and Design and worked as a teacher and community arts worker before she joined Field Day Theatre Company in 1980. In 1984 she, Anne Crilly and Trisha Ziff founded the Derry Film and Video Workshop. They made a number of films including her first fiction film, Hush-a-Bye Baby (1990). In 1992, she set up Besom Productions to make films for broadcast and cinema, often scrutinising forms of social injustice. Her works have won many festival and industry prizes and garnered significant international acclaim, as with her most recent feature, Stolen (2023). Harkin is a member of Aosdána and, in 2025, the Irish Film Institute hosted a career retrospective of her work, Radical Witness.
Sylvia Stevens is a co-founder of Faction Films/Faction Media, with over thirty years of experience as a producer and director. She has made programmes for BBC, Channel 4, ITV, and with NETFLIX, RTE, PBS, NHK, ARTE, HBO, and AJ. Films range from the social and political to the arts including, in Northern Ireland, Picturing Derry and Redeeming History. Other films include War Takes (war in Colombia), Tales Beyond Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez on writing for cinema), Love Honour and Disobey (domestic violence) and Educating Igor (Roma in Slovakia). Her feature documentaries include Chevolution, Android in La La Land-Gary Numan, The Plan, and Off the Rails. Stevens has been the EAVE Documentary Expert since 2005 and Change workshop from 2021.
Prof Cahal McLaughlin is a filmmaker from Belfast. He was part of the cooperative group that established Just Books in Belfast in 1976 and then Belfast Independent Video where he worked on several documentaries for community and broadcast exhibition. He has worked in different film advocacy roles and more recently his films include We Fight For This Land: Ka’apor and Quilombola Communities in Brazil (2024); We Never Gave Up (2022) on reparations in South Africa; and Armagh Stories: Voices from the Gaol (2015) on the female Troubles prison. He has previously sat on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Media Practice and on the Board of the Belfast Film Festival. He is Director of the Prisons Memory Archive and is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at QUB.
Dr Sara Greavu is the Director of Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. Previously she was Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre and the curator, with Project, of the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024) with artist Eimear Walshe. Before that, she worked at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry; VOID Arts Centre; and Outburst Arts, Belfast and independently as a curator, writer and organiser. Independent projects include We Realised the power of it, an evolving research and exhibition project produced with artist Ciara Phillips and former members of the Derry Film and Video Workshop, which dealt with intertwined political and cultural initiatives in Derry in the 1980s.
Dr Maeve Connolly (she/her) is an educator, writer and researcher based in Dublin, where she teaches at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Her research explores changing cultures, economies and infrastructures of art and media practice. She has authored two books, TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014) and The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009). Recent publications include contributions to the anthologies Early Video Art in Europe – A Plural History (Les Presses du Reel, 2026), Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 (Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2019) and Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2019).
