Malgorzata Bugaj
Malgorzata Bugaj is from Gdansk, Poland and studied at the University of Gdansk before completing her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She currently teaches Film, Media and Contemporary Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in European, and particularly, Eastern European film. Her broader research interests revolve around avant-garde cinema, the representations of senses in film (an upcoming book chapter on the representations of smell in cinema), as well as the intersections of film and other media (here publications on such directors as Andrzej Wajda, Alexander Sokurov, or Peter Strickland, and videos artists such as Douglas Gordon and Christian Marclay). Malgorzata is currently preparing two short courses for the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Open Learning: “Cinema and the Five Senses”, and “The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski”. She is also a co-founder of KinoKlub, a film collective showcasing rare surreal masterpieces from all over the world in unusual locations and immersive projections.
Maria Chester
After studying at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts, María Chester decided to deepen her studies in Art History at the UBA-University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Once there, she also decided to study Archaeology which allowed her to specialize in the pre-Hispanic cultures of America. This combination of studies gave her the possibility of a unique insight into her first passion: rock art. The point of view of an art historian and that of an archaeologist helped her to present master classes on these subjects. María is multilingual and likes to travel to discover new cultures. She taught at various public and private universities. Since 2007, she is the National Subject Advisor on Ancient Civilizations of the Americas for The Third Age Trust, which the umbrella for more than one thousand individual’s U3As in the United Kingdom. She also belongs to the International Committee (of which she was a founder) at the same organisation. (www.u3a.org). In May 2016, María was appointed Secretary General of AIUTA, the International Association of Universities of the Third Age and since then she has worked hard to impulse the movement around the world. (www.aiu3a.org). Since 2017, she has been teaching courses on Art History for BEA-Berwick Educational Association (www.berwickea.org) which in association with the Berwick Visual Arts organizes lectures and guided tours on exhibitions organized at The Granary Gallery in Berwick upon Tweed, England. Maria does the research and prepares the talks on these specific topics. In October 2018, she was awarded with her accreditation as a Lecturer by The Arts Society in London, to which a few belong (only 300 in the entire UK). In 2020, she was invited to be part of the team of lecturers at Art Historical London, which organizes talks and virtual seminars on different aspects of art. (www.arthistoricallondon.com). Maria was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lived for 19 years in Caracas, Venezuela, where her daughter Inés was born to her in 1988. Since 2003, she lives in Scotland.
Anne Everest
Anne Everest qualified as a teacher in 1980 and taught part-time at the University of Hull in the early part of her career, delivering undergraduate courses in Roman history, Ancient Greek history and Roman Britain. From 1991 she did all her teaching in Scotland, where she is qualified to teach Latin, Greek, Classical Studies and English. A Deputy Head of Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen for five years, she became Head of St Margaret’s, Aberdeen in 2007, and retired from her second headship at St George’s School, Edinburgh at the end of 2016. She and her husband, Paul, have lived full-time in Berwick since November 2018.
Gerry Foley
Gerry Foley has nearly 40 years experience as a broadcast journalist. Starting out as a reporter on Irish Television’s premier current affairs programme in Dublin, he soon travelled north to Belfast where he spent 4 years ( 1984-88) reporting on ‘The Troubles’. Westminster was to be his home for the next quarter of a century, where he travelled with, and interviewed, every Prime Minister from the late Baroness Thatcher to David Cameron. Now living in Berwick , Gerry is a regular chair at book festivals across the country .
Mike Fraser
Mike is a proud Scot who has been exiled in England for many years. He is a former College Lecturer; he graduated from Strathclyde University and has post-graduate degrees from Newcastle and Northumbria Universities. Mike took early retirement in 1997 and initially took great pleasure in being a layabout around Newcastle upon Tyne. In 2004 however Mike and his wife moved to Belford and one day, idly reading a book about Berwick MPs, he discovered that Sir William Beveridge was MP for the Berwick upon Tweed constituency for a brief period at the end of the Second World War. His curiosity aroused, he began to research the political history of North Northumberland. Five studies, three publications and approximately forty talks later, including two successful appearances at the Berwick Literary Festival, he has decided to return to his main interest i.e. the study of twentieth-century culture. Mike and his wife moved to Berwick upon Tweed in 2015 and he is both a Trustee and a Steering Committee member of the Berwick Literary Festival. His leisure interests include football, music, art, literature, drama, photography and hill-walking.
Mariam Ghorbankarimi
Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Maryam Ghorbankarimi moved to Canada in 2001 to continue her education in film at Toronto's Ryerson University. She completed her PhD in film studies at the University of Edinburgh in November 2012, her dissertation was entitled “A Colourful Presence; An Analysis of the Evolution in the Representation of Women in Iranian Cinema since the 1990”. As well as a scholar Maryam is a filmmaker and have made some award winning short films in both formats of short documentary and fiction. These works have been shown in a number of international festivals, namely: Montreal International Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, and Tehran International Short Film Festival. She is also a film editor and recently edited an Iranian-Canadian feature length film entitled “The Desert Fish”. Her wider research interests include the concept of third cinema and different national cinemas and transnational cinemas and cultures. Her current research is mostly on world cinema subjects, with a focus on Middle Eastern cinema specifically.
Pasquale Iannone
Pasquale is a Film Academic and Critic, and works at the University of Edinburgh, teaching Open Studies courses such as Childhood and the Cinema, Italian Cinema and The Art and Practice of the Video Essay. He is currently working on a volume on Jean-Pierre Melville's 'L'armée des ombres' for BFI/Palgrave, and upcoming publications include chapters on Luchino Visconti's 'Conversation Piece' (Routledge), sound/music in Hitchcock (Manchester University Press) and Pietro Germi and the Italo-Western (Edinburgh University Press). Pasquale is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema, to BBC Radio 4's 'The Film Programme' and BBC Radio Scotland's 'The Culture Studio'.He has also curated several film seasons for Filmhouse (Edinburgh), Glasgow Film Theatre and BFI Southbank, including seasons on Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel and Bob Dylan.
Adrian Jannetta
Adrian is a passionate advocate of science (particularly astronomy) and mathematics. His astronomical interests are wide ranging and include visual astronomy (using telescopes), astrophotography and spectroscopy.
He has developed and taught numerous courses and outreach sessions in astronomy - mostly during his role as Training Officer for Northumberland Astronomical Society (NASTRO) during the period 2000 - 2016. He is currently Vice-Chair of NASTRO.
His primary degree is in mathematics in 1997, and he was awarded a PhD in mathematical physics in 2005. In 2017 he gained a MSc in Observational Astrophysics. He has co-authored papers in medical physics, cosmology and astrophysics. He is a qualified teacher, having gained a PGCE in 2007.
Since 2008, he works at INTO Newcastle University as module leader for maths on the Foundation Science and Engineering programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Chartered Mathematician.
Roger Mitchell
Roger gained an MA in Film Studies from the University of Newcastle in 1996. He has not only taught in secondary and higher education since then, but has also run courses at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle for more than 20 years. Roger’s main interests are the cinemas of Europe and East Asia.
Martin Parker
Martin Parker, who is a composer, improviser and sound artist, is programme director of the MSc Sound Design at the University of Edinburgh, artistic director of Dialogues Music Festival, and a member of Unrivalled Jetsam, a computer music laptop trio with Jules Rawlinson and Dave Murray-Rust. Martin’s compositions have been performed by some of the world’s finest experimental performers, including Joby Burgess, Phil Minton, Anne La Berge, Peter Furniss, The Athelas Sinfonietta and New Noise London. He has made collaborative work with Evan Parker, Theatre Cryptic, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Music at the Brewhouse and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and his sound installations have been presented in places as diverse as the Klangturm, Austria and in the National Trust For Scotland’s abandoned library at Newhailes.
Martine Pierquin
Martine Pierquin studied cinema history in Paris and European film studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches general film studies, French cinema and the UALL award-nominee course “An Insight into EIFF”, in partnership with Edinburgh International Film Festival. She has published on film director Jean Eustache and has contributed lectures and film introductions to the French Film Festival UK for many years. She was involved in piloting “Understanding Cinema”, the Edinburgh Filmhouse’s five- year running film-making programme for young people, in collaboration with the British Film Institute and the Cinemathèque Française in Paris. Her current research is on film education and lifelong learning.
KathyTiernan
Katharine Tiernan is a Northumbrian by birth and spent many childhood afternoons on the shores of Lindisfarne. She was educated in the Scottish Borders and went on to study English Literature at York University, followed later by an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle. She has worked as a teacher and in Community Arts and now as a writer.
A chance visit to an exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Library a few years ago re-awakened her interest in the early history of Northumbria. Her research uncovered a rich vein of legends and stories of the north’s early medieval past, mainly confined to old manuscripts and little-read academic treatises. As a novelist, she wanted to find a way to re-imagine these stories for a contemporary audience as part of a shared Northumbrian heritage. The resulting novels have taken shape as a trilogy, covering the period from Cuthbert’s life in the seventh century up to the building of his shrine at Durham in the eleventh. She continues to be fascinated by the period and the story and looks forward to sharing them with you.
Alison Tymon
Alison Tymon graduated from Leeds University with a degree in Geography/Geology, and taught at Greenhead Sixth Form College, Huddersfield for the great majority of her career. She is an organiser for geoconservation in West Yorkshire, lecturer and writer of articles, leaflets and booklets about rocks and landscapes, and a leader of field trips in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Scotland and Iceland over many years. Alison is Chairman of West Yorkshire Geology Trust.
Gill Walton
Gill Walton is the founder and main tutor of Allanbank Arts, a teaching art centre near Duns in the Scottish Borders. She is a practising artist and a former art college lecturer. She has many years of experience in life drawing and teaching, and has found that, though knowledge and experience are important, kindness and humour are equally valuable. She initially trained as a sculptor but her current work includes painting, drawing and sculpture. Her work is mainly figurative and deals with the complexities of human relationships. You can visit Gill’s websites: gillwalton.co.uk, allanbankarts.co.uk.
Mike Worboys
Mike has a PhD in mathematics and is Professor of Spatial Informatics in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences, University of Greenwich, London, where he is leader of the Greenwich GI Science Research Group (g3). Until the end of 2012 he was director of the School of Computing and Information Science, and a professor in the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of Maine, USA. Mike is also a composer and sound artist, having an interest in both instrumental and electroacoustic music. He holds a Master of Music degree in Composition from Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. His instrumental music has been performed at the London Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), the National Maritime Museum, other venues around London, and the St. Magnus Cathedral, Orkney. His piano work, ‘Bone Memories’, recently won first prize in the John Halford competition for piano and composition judged by pianist Ian Pace. He also composes electroacoustic works, and has recently collaborated with Allanton artists Charles Paulsen and Pauline Burbidge for an electroacoustic installation at the Edinburgh City Art Centre, showing from November 2017 to March 2018. You can find out more at https://www.worboys.org