Ways of Doing #7
Happy September, dear WoD subscribers,
This month we have some truly epic WoD news to share (and trust us—it’s been really tough sitting on this until now!). In January 2026, Lucy, Colleen, and Dayna will launch a major three-year project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council: Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice.
Ways of Undoing will explore how videographic practice can resist and undo entrenched hierarchies that structure both filmmaking and academia, instead prioritizing systems of knowledge and modes of making grounded in craft, community, and collaboration. Building on the work WoD has been developing together over the past few years that emphasizes process, embodied thinking, and collective action, the project will create opportunities for research, exchange, and making that push videographic criticism into new territories.
Over three years, the project will host annual, funded in-residence workshops in St Andrews (2026), Vancouver (2027), and Tokyo (2028), alongside public screenings, exhibitions, online resources, and open-access publications. Alison will also be part of this adventure as a member of the stellar advisory board, which includes John Gibbs, Catherine Grant, and Kevin B. Lee. Project partners span Dundee Contemporary Arts, Meiji University (with Lindsay Nelson), Aoyama Gakuin University (with Chelsea Szendi Schieder), The Video Essay Podcast (with Will DiGravio), and the Locarno Film Festival (with Kevin B. Lee). Keep an eye on our website for updates, including the first call for workshop participants once the project kicks off in January! We are so very excited for this next journey!
In a solo capacity however, Alison is not doing anything fun. Alison is writing her book. Alison was writing her book in the last newsletter. She is writing it now. She will be writing it forever. She had a nice holiday in Portugal over summer and read The Priory of the Orange Tree which is what you should read if you wish Lord of the Rings was feminist and queer for women, but other than that…
The one good thing is that her HELLO? video essay is finally published. If you like old (and new) slasher films and feminist re-envisioning of film history, you might want to check it out.
Over the summer, Colleen taught a new summer course for her home institution (The University of British Columbia) on “Asia and The Video Essay.” It was a graduate-level class on videographic criticism with an emphasis on Asian and Asian diasporic media in which students analyzed and produced video essays to explore how the fields of Asian Studies and Videographic Criticism might intersect to reshape how we listen to, look at, and think about media. And on that pedagogy note, she is currently co-teaching a course with Ariel Avissar online for the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Graduate Certificate in Videographic Criticism.
Colleen is also a little up to her eyeballs with an advance book contract for her monograph on Japanese women directors (yay!), but is also co-editing two videographic-specific special journal issues with “Reframing the Argument” workshop collabors Ariel Avissar, Matthew Thomas Payne, and Barbara Zecchi. The June workshop brought together an extremely talented group of graduate students to work through their thesis and dissertation topics reframed as videographic criticism, and the collective works are in the process of publication and screening revisions. You can have a sneak peak at their talent over at Fragments, where Benedetta Andreasi shared one of her workshop exercises, “Cheezit Timeline,” that…had some technical difficulty which yielded creative magic. And for a narrative taste of the experience, we direct you to this interview with Meg Healy who discussed the workshop with her home department at Syracuse University.
Dayna spent the summer recovering from colon cancer chemo and having her thyroid removed (thanks to a Seinfeld-like goiter, unrelated!). She didn’t lose her voice, for which she is most grateful. Amidst all this, she co-taught at Middlebury Video Camp alongside Jason Mittell, Celia Sainz Delgado, Ethan Murphy, and Max Gibson, with Catherine Grant Zooming in as mentor. In addition to supporting this year’s fantastic cohort of campers, Dayna made They’re Just Hands!, a tribute to her wife MJ who passed away in December 2024. Dayna’s also working on a video installation starring her AI doppelgänger DaynAI that deals with grief, survival, and empathy as part of a residency about responsible AI that will open in November in a group show curated by Christelle Proulx at the Université de Montréal.
This summer, Dayna’s You Said Forever showed at Groupe Intervention Vidéo’s 34th edition of Vidéos de Femmes dans le Parc, and her intro dance from her video essay potbelly was part of an Exquisite Corpse film sculpture curated by Abygai Peña and Jay Reinier for Millennium Film Workshop. Dayna finished hinge maw for WoD’s Conceptual Epigraph, which you should try if you’re up for it. This is a group thinking-together exercise and she was in thought with Viktoria Paranyuk who made Meet Part the basis for a longer video essay, and Sadia Quraeshi Shepard (hers is coming soon!). Dayna is headed to Wesleyan to give an artist’s talk and lead a Master Class, then on to UMASS Amherst for the Visiting Filmmakers Series, where she’ll be teaching videographic criticism this semester.
Lucy made another ASMR foley video this summer: Walking | Rattling | Scuffling in the dark - part of an ongoing collaborative project with sound artist and designer, Julie Rose Bower. The video repurposes the audio tracks from Julie’s ASMR at the Museum series at the V&A and remixes them in with Cat People (a perfect film to see us into the darkening nights…). This autumn, Lucy is looking forward to visiting Lugano, Switzerland to see Johannes Binotto, Evelyn Kreutzer and Kevin B Lee (the fantastic leaders of the three-year research project The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies) where she will join them and their team for a day of making and conversation, and also lead a workshop for Kevin’s students. Otherwise she is eagerly anticipating the arrival of January which will bring the start of the ‘Ways of Undoing’ project, and a stretch of research leave, which means getting stuck into her videographic book project!
What we are watching (and listening to) right now
Anthony Ing, Jill, Uncredited
Rhea Storr, Black Sonic Project: Heritage as Heresy
Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková, The Return of the Star Wipe
“Aging Stars – Fading to Dust or Shining as Stardust?” edition of the Screen Stars Dictionary, special editor Barbara Zecchi
Cormac Donnelly, The Anthropocene Will Eat Itself
Miljana Nikovic, Squares
Viktoria Paranyuk, Meet Part | Mothers Daughters
Amelia Dimoldenberg, Trixie Mattel | Chicken Shop Date
As ever, we’d love to hear from you, and especially if you are using our exercises! If you want to say hi, please just reply to this message, and if you’ve made something using any of our prompts, please do tell us and we may feature it on the website.
See you in the Winter for more project announcements, news and recommendations,
Love, WoD
(Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod and Alison Peirse)