Julian Ross is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Julian Ross

Bio

Julian Ross (he/him) is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, where he teaches on the courses MA Film & Photographic Studies and BA Film en literatuurwetenschap. He is minor coordinator for Theatre en Film and a founding co-director of the cross-faculty research centre ReCNTR.

He is co-programmer of Doc Fortnight 2023 and 2024 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and co-programmer of the Flaherty Seminar 2024, which will be held at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, Thailand. Previously, he was programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno Film Festival, a guest programmer at Singapore International Film Festival, and film program advisor at IDFA. His curatorial work has been presented at Tate Modern, Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthal Rotterdam, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archives, British Film Institute, Light Industry, Tallinn Photomonth Biennale, e-flux Video & Film and other places. In 2019, he was selected as one of thirty “Future Leaders” in film programming and curating by Screen International. He regularly collaborates with Eye Filmmuseum on film programmes and is a mentor for participants of their Programmes of the Future project.

He was a recipient of the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2015-18) as a Research Fellow at University of Westminster, where he was also a Research Associate on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project led by Professor May Adadol Ingawanij. He received his PhD on 1960s-70s Japanese expanded cinema at the University of Leeds. He is co-editor of Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia (Archive Books, 2020) and has published in the edited collections The Moving Form of Film (Oxford University Press, 2023), A Companion to Experimental Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), The Japanese Cinema Book (BFI, 2020), the journals Non-fiction, Photography & Culture, and Photoresearcher, magazines Sight and Sound, Extra Extra, and Film Comment, and various festival and exhibition catalogues.

Research interests

• Artists’ moving image
• Experimental film
• Asian cinema
• Documentary
• Intermediality
• Film installation and performance
• Video Art
• Media Archaeology
• World cinema

Research

My ongoing research on Japanese expanded cinema in the 1960-70s began with my PhD dissertation ‘Beyond the Frame: Intermedia and Expanded Cinema in 1960-70s Japan’, supervised by Professor Lúcia Nagib at the University of Leeds. Since, it has led to several projects: a 2016 film and performance series Throwing Shadows for Tate Modern and International Film Festival Rotterdam, co-curated with Go Hirasawa; the 2017 group exhibition Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, for which I was curatorial advisor; group exhibition More Than Cinema: Motoharu Jonouchi and Keiichi Tanaami at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, co-curated with Ann Adachi-Tasch and Go Hirasawa in 2020; and the book Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s (Archive Books, 2020) co-edited with Ann Adachi-Tasch and Go Hirasawa, for which a book launch was organised with MoMA, Eye Filmmuseum and Tallinn Photomonth Biennale. With funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, Collaborative Cataloging Japan, a non-profit organisation for which I am Core Research Member, initiated collection surveys and preservation projects for works of Japanese expanded cinema. My research on Japanese expanded cinema is a historical study that proposes to not only internationalise the study of expanded cinema but also to consider the local critical discourse of the period as a contribution.

As part of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2015-18), I researched how the carousel slide projector has been used by contemporary artists internationally since Kodak terminated its production in 2004. The research project culminated in the 2019 group exhibition Blackout, which was presented at Kunsthal Rotterdam as part of International Film Festival Rotterdam, after which it was presented in Ambika P3 (London) and Greylight Projects (Brussels). The exhibition was covered by Sight & Sound, NECSUS, Hyperallergic, MUBI Notebook, De Groene Amsterdammer, De Filmkrant and Metropolis M. Part of the project forms a book chapter I contributed for The Moving Form of Film (Oxford University Press, 2023). The project questions to what extent the industry determines the lifespan of a technological apparatus and, again, calls for the internationalisation of the study.

In 2018-19, I was Research Associate for Professor May Adadol Ingawanij’s British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship research project Animistic Apparatus. As part of this project, we co-organised the following: a research workshop in Udon Thani, Thailand, with 40 artists, curators and researchers; screenings at Alliance Française Bangkok, Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival (London), Rijksacademie (Amsterdam), Nordland Kunst- og Filmfagskole (Kabelvåg, Norway), Other Futures (Amsterdam), Zone2Source (Amsterdam), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; and a group exhibitions as part of NTT ICC (Tokyo) and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (UK). The project has received coverage from Sight & Sound, Art Monthly and NANG, and we are contributing a co-written article in an upcoming issue of the journal World Records.

I’m co-editor of the World Cinema Series (Bloomsbury) with Lúcia Nagib since 2016 and I’m on the advisory board for the book series Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image (Palgrave MacMillan), the editorial board of MUBI’s Notebook magazine, and the programem board for Extra Extra. Previously, I have been on the selection committees of Asia Cultural Centre Cinema Fund (2020), Hubert Bals Fund (2017-2021) and Eye Experimental distribution of Eye International (2017) and have served on several juries at film festivals, including at CPH:DOX, IndieLisboa, Netherlands Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, among others.

For more details on my written work and research presentations, please see: www.rossjulian.com

Teaching (2023-24)

Cinema: Avant-garde (BA), Third Cinema (BA), and Documentary: Audiovisual Evidence (BA). Co-teaching Curating Film and Video (MA), Contemporary Theories of Film (MA), Animation, Comics, Graphic Novel (BA), TV Series (BA), World Cinema A (BA).

I joined Leiden University in September 2019.

Publications

Activities