The On/Off Screen Symposium was organized by Professor Ana M. López and Postdoctoral fellow Irene Rozsa of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Communication Department at Tulane University in close collaboration with Professor Philippe Meers (University of Antwerp) and Daniel Biltereyst (University of Ghent).
Daniel Biltereyst 
Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he teaches film and media history, and cultural media studies. Besides being Director of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) and an elected member of the Academia Europaea, he is also linked to the HoMER network. He is the main supervisor of the Hercules/FWO-funded Cinema Ecosystem (CINECOS) project, aiming at building an open access data platform for cinema history in Flanders and Belgium (2018-22). A light version of the Cinema Belgica platform was launched in October 2020 during the international Film Festival Ghent. Biltereyst published Explorations in New Cinema History (2011, with R. Maltby and Ph. Meers), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (2012, with R. Maltby and Ph. Meers), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World (2013, with R. Vande Winkel), Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism, and Power (2015, with D. Treveri Gennari), a special issue on cinemagoing experiences and memory for Memory Studies (2017, with A. Kuhn and Ph. Meers), the Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019, with R. Maltby and Ph. Meers), and Mapping Movie Magazines (2020, with Lies Van de Vijver). He recently published a monograph on the history of film/cinema censorship in Belgium (Verboden beelden: De verborgen geschiedenis van filmcensuur in België, 2020) and he made a documentary with Bruno Mestdagh on film cuttings, Ongezien/invisible (2020, Cinematek). He is working on Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches (Bloomsbury, with Ifdal Elsaket and Philippe Meers) and on New Perspectives on Early Cinema History (Bloomsbury, with Mario Slugan).
A full list of publications can be consulted here: Daniel Biltereyst
Ana M López 
Ana M. López is Professor of Communication and Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute. She also serves as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. Her research is focused on Latin American and Latino film and cultural studies. She is co-editor (with Marvin DLugo and Laura Podalsky) of The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema (2017) and the editor in chief of the Intellect journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. She is also the author of the collection of essays Hollywood, Nuestra América y los Latinos (Ediciones Unión, Havana, 2012) and co-editor of three collections of essays on Latin American cinema. She has published more than three dozen essays and book chapters, addressing topics that range from melodrama and performance in the Golden Age Cinemas of Latin America, early silent cinema and modernity, and documentary to telenovelas, Cuban American media and intermediality.
See her academic profile in Google Scholar.
Download her full curriculum vita.
Philippe Meers 
Philippe Meers is a professor of film and media studies at the University of Antwerp, Department of Communication Studies. Meers is the chair of the Antwerp Doctoral School and Center for Mexican Studies at the same university, and a member of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi). Before moving to the University of Antwerp, Meers conducted research at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) in Ghent where he was one of the founders of the centre.
His work covers a wide range of topics including European media history, new cinema histories, audience studies and transnationalism. He has extensively published in leading academic journals including Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Screen and Alphaville. He is the co-editor of the books The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019), Explorations in New Cinema History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (Routledge, 2011).
For more information on Philippe Meers’ career and work visit his University of Antwerp and ResearchGate pages.
Irene Rozsa 
Irene. Rozsa received her Ph.D.in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University in Montreal in 2020. She was recognized for exemplary achievements during her graduate career. with the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal from her alma mater. This award, one of the most prestigious in the Canadian Academy, honors “the student who achieves the highest academic standing at the graduate level.” It is awarded to only one Concordia graduate student per graduating cohort. Her dissertation, “On the Edge of the Screen: Film Culture and Practices of Noncommercial Cinema in Cuba (1948-1966)” employs archival research to trace the development of Cuban cinema in the years preceding and immediately following the establishment of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) in 1959. It expands the focus of Cuban media studies both temporally and thematically. Integrating examinations of exhibition, distribution, promotion, and knowledge dissemination, Dr. Rozsa highlights the continuities in Cuban cinematic traditions before and after the Revolution. This approach sets Dr. Rozsa at the forefront of developments in her field, and her work has been published in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas and the edited anthology Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960. During AY 20-21, she is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stone Center of Tulane University, working with Prof. Ana M. López on a postdoctoral project examining the impact of the Catholic Church on Cuban, Peruvian, and Brazilian cinema from the 1940s the 1980s.
See her publications in Academia.edu: https://concordia.academia.edu/IreneRozsa