University of Padua

Farah Polato is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Heritage – Archaeology and History of Art, Cinema, and Music (dBC) at the University of Padua, where she teaches Film Theory and Series and Seriality in Media Culture. Additionally, she serves as the coordinator of the dBC research activities on Media, Landscape and Tourism (CineLands. Media, paesaggio e turismo) (https://cinelands.beniculturali.unipd.it/). Within this framework, she promotes projects and initiatives designed to involve and collaborate with citizens, students, local communities, as well as public and private agencies with the aim to investigate policies and practices that promote inclusiveness and accessibility. Among these projects, she was the main coordinator of the research projects Strumenti innovativi per la promozione turistica: film-induced tourism (Innovative Tools for Tourist Promotion: Film-Induced Tourism), funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the European Social Fund in 2014-2015, and Il Veneto, le acque e il cinema. Strumenti innovativi di valorizzazione territoriale (Veneto, its Waters and Cinema. Innovative Tools for Territorial Enhancement) from 2016 to 2018.

Laura Cesaro is research fellow at the University of Padua (Italy). Her research interests concern film festival studies and the relationship between cinema and territory. In collaboration with the CineLands research project (dBC – Unipd), her focus of investigation is the visual perspectives related to mapping the territory, including the design of didactic and educational models. She is the author of Geografie del controllo nella scena audiovisiva contemporanea (Bulzoni, 2022).

Alessandro Faccioli is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Heritage – Archaeology and History of Art, Cinema, and Music (DBC) of the University of Padua, where he teaches Film History and Film Genres. He is the president of the Degree Course in Disciplines of the Arts, Music and Performing Arts (DAMS). He obtained a Doctorate in Theater and Cinema Studies at the University of Bologna and directed research projects. Among the latter, in 2016 the PRAT-Project Urban Landscapes and Home Movies: the Image of the City and Innovative Tools to harness a Hidden Visual Cultural Heritage (Italy, 1930-1980s). For the two-year period 2019-2020 he was appointed member of the Technical Commission for the Evaluation of fund requests under the POR FESR 2014-2020 of the Veneto Region.

Michael Guarneri works as a research fellow at Università degli Studi di Padova. From 2021 to 2023 he collaborated to Università di Bologna’s PRIN 2017 research project “A Private History of Italian Film Criticism”, studying the relationships between film critics and political and military
institutions in Italy from 1945 to the mid-1960s. He is the author of the monographs Questi fiori malati: Il cinema di Pedro Costa (Bébert, 2017), Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Conversations with Lav Diaz (Piretti Editore, 2020).

Laura Lo Presti is a research fellow at the Department of Historical, Geographical and Ancient Sciences, University of Padua, where she coordinates the departmental node “Theories and Methods” of the Center for Advanced Studies Mobility & Humanities. She also teaches Geography at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies. She is interested in the study of contemporary cartographies with theoretical and methodological contaminations from visual studies and critical theory. She particularly studies the relations between geography, youth studies and cinema. This research context includes participation in the international project Imagining Young Lives: The Film Landscapes of Global Youth coordinated by Stuart Aitken and Jake Rowlett (San Diego University).

Manlio Piva is Permanent Researcher SSD L-Art/06 at the FiSPPA Department of the University of Padua. He teachesArtistic Education and Media Education at the CdLM in Primary Education Sciences, and Audiovisual and Multimedia Education at the CdLM in Performing Sciences and Multimedia Production. His main fields of research concern Film & Media Literacy & Education, on which he also carries out educational experimentation and training of in-service teachers, modeling best practices for the digital curriculum. Among these, the creation and educational use of geolocalized multimedia maps with which will provide the research group PRIN 2020 a useful support to the integrative activities and dissemination planned with schools and the territory.