Dr Michael Hrebeniak

Academic position: Lecturer in Film Poetics

Department: Culture, Communication and Media (IoE)

UCL Website: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=MHREB08

Biography

I specialise in film essays, visual culture and 20th century writing and critical theory. Recent publications include chapters in edited collections on ecopoetics, cinematic memory, photography, Beat writing, televisual representations of the everyday, the 1968 uprisings and jazz. My 68-minute film, Stirbitch: An Imaginary, on the subject of topography and memory was premiered by the Heong Gallery in December 2019. I am the Founder and Convenor of an experimental HE project, the New School of the Anthropocene (www.nsota.org), dedicated to confronting biopolitical emergency through the arts in collaboration with October Gallery in Bloomsbury. Prior to this I spent many years as a member of the Cambridge University Faculty of English, served as a documentary producer for Channel 4 TV and worked as a jazz journalist and musician.

Research Projects

I am currently working on a new film about the turbocapitalist development of Nine Elms on banks of the Thames framed by Cantos 7-11 of Dante’s Inferno. I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for the 2020-21 academic year to support research for a new book, Bottled Neon, on the poetics of the BBC Arena documentary strand, to be published by the BFI in 2024.

Teaching

CCME0149 Documentary Film (2nd Year BA Media – module leader)
CCME0144: Short Fiction Films (2nd Year BA Media – co-taught module)