Kester Dyer
Associate Professor; Undergraduate & Practicum Supervisor
- PhD (Concordia University), MA (University College Dublin), BA (University of Portsmouth)
- Email Kester Dyer
Kester Dyer (he/him) is a settler scholar whose work focusses on Qu茅b茅cois, Canadian, and Indigenous film and media, ecocinema, and film genres, as well as on decolonial and research-creation approaches to film and media. Kester is interested in supervising graduate students and postdocs working in the above-mentioned areas.
Dyer鈥檚 current book project titled Otherworldly Incursions: The Supernatural in Qu茅bec Cinema is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and comprises a broad exploration of the Qu茅bec film corpus since the 1990s. This project analyzes how supernatural tropes across genres reveal key information about the Qu茅bec social imaginary鈥檚 struggle to delineate relationships between historically dominant and more marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples and immigrants.
In parallel, a significant part of Dyer鈥檚 work revolves around research-creation. He was awarded the Film Studies Association of Canada鈥檚 Gerald Pratley Award for his research on , a unique transportable production initiative aimed at emerging Indigenous filmmakers. In his ensuing collaboration with Wapikoni, he co-founded (with Liz Miller, Communication Studies, Concordia University) the community-building project. This initiative, supported by several SSHRC grants since 2016, features an annual cross-platform media-making and film programming Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers. As part of this project, emerging Indigenous filmmakers from various communities have participated in workshops at both Concordia and 杏吧原创 Universities, focussing on different media platforms and techniques, including animation (sand and paper, rotoscoping), drawing on film, experimental video, podcasting, sound recording and design, documentary, underwater camerawork, projection mapping, using green screen and drones, 360-degree and VR filmmaking, and other approaches. Through these workshops, emerging Indigenous artists have developed a range of skills and generated their own short video artworks.
The two most recent production-focussed iterations of our Summer Institute in partnership with Wapikoni Mobile took place at 杏吧原创 University in August 2023 and 2024. These workshops involved 15 emerging Indigenous filmmakers, numerous staff, faculty, and student collaborators from across different departments, as well as special guests and local community collaborators such The Indigenous Film and Media Festival and Ottawa鈥檚 Digital Arts Resource Center (). It was also supported by 杏吧原创鈥檚 Centre for Indigenous Support and Community Engagement (CISCE), Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada (MSSC), Teaching and Learning Services Media Production (TLS), the Certificate in Journalism in Indigenous Communities (CJIIC) at 杏吧原创, and the 杏吧原创 University Art Gallery ().
Publications
Co-authored with Michelle Smith, Pasha Partridge, M茅lina Quitich-Niquay, and Liz Miller. 鈥淒ecolonizing Documentary Spaces: Enacting Care-full Methods within Educational Institutions.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Journal of Environmental Media. Forthcoming.
听Journal of Cinema and Media Studies听64.5, 2025.
鈥淎 Transportable/Transnational Cinema: Wapikoni Mobile.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Teaching Migration in Literature, Film and Media. Edited by Masha Salazkina and Yumna Siddiqi. The Modern Language Association of America, 2025. 85-101.
鈥.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Canadian Journal of Film Studies 32.2 (Fall 2023): 7-34.
鈥淪cience Fiction, National Rebirth, and Messianism in Un 32 ao没t sur terre.鈥&苍产蝉辫;ReFocus: The Films of Denis Villeneuve. Edited by Jeri English and Marie Pascal. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 23-40.
鈥.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory. Edited by Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger and Philipp Keidl. Meson Press, 2020.
鈥淟andscape, Trauma, and Identity: Simon Lavoie鈥檚 Le torrent.鈥&苍产蝉辫;A Cinema of Pain: Essays on Quebec鈥檚 Nostalgic Screen. Edited by Liz Czach and Andr茅 Loiselle. Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2020.
鈥尝茅辞濒辞鈥檚 Fantasized Italy: Family Romance and Accented Cinema in Qu茅bec.鈥&苍产蝉辫;Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. 5.1 (Jan 2017): 47-64.
鈥.鈥&苍产蝉辫;In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization. Edited by Helen Gilbert, J. D. Phillipson, and Michelle H. Raheja. Liverpool University Press, 2017. 105-122.
芦 Le 鈥榬efus鈥 dans la t茅l茅s茅rie Mohawk Girls de Tracey Deer.&苍产蝉辫;禄&苍产蝉辫;T茅l茅 en s茅ries. Edited by J-O Allard, E. Despr茅s, S. Harel, M.-C. Lambert-Perreault. Montreal: 脡ditions XYZ, 2017.
Guest Editor with Fulvia Massimi and Andr茅e Lafontaine of 鈥溾 for Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 4.2 (March 2016).
芦 Miracles, mythes, cin茅ma : La vraie nature de Bernadette et The Butcher Boy.&苍产蝉辫;禄&苍产蝉辫;Le Qu茅bec et l鈥橧rlande : Culture, histoire, identit茅. Edited by Simon Jolivet, Linda Cardinal, Isabelle Matte. Qu茅bec City: 脡ditions du Septentrion, 2014. 166-196.