Team

Cátia Rodrigues (Porto, 1995) is a film programmer and researcher working at the intersection of film theory, aesthetics, and contemporary moving-image practices. She is currently a PhD candidate in Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University of Lisbon. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Porto (2020) and an MA in Aesthetics and Artistic Studies (2023), where she developed the dissertation The Gesture of Showing in Abbas Kiarostami: An Analysis Based on Wittgenstein and Agamben, reflecting her broader engagement with philosophical approaches to cinema. Alongside her academic work, she operates within the field of film curation and exhibition. She collaborates as a film programmer with Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival and BEAST International Film Festival, and since 2021 has curated Mostra de Primeiras Curtas at Livraria Térmita (Porto). She is a member of the editorial board of La Furia Umana, a journal focused on film theory and history, and previously served as an editor at Krino Ifilnova. Her writing has been published in À Pala de Walsh, Krino Ifilnova, La Furia Umana, Aniki - Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento, Lote, Variety, among others. She has been a research collaborator at FILM AND DEATH since September 2025, contributing to the development of the project's third goal (P3): Close-Up on Film-Philosophical Death.

German filmmaker and philosopher holding a PhD from the Lisbon University. She was junior professor for "Theory and Praxis of Artistic Research in Digital Media" at Filmuniversity Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam 2019-2023 and as well head of the Institute for Artistic Research at the Filmuniversity. From fall 2023, she is full professor for "Film and Digital Arts" at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum. Reeh-Peters is editor of several anthologies and one monograph on film-philosophy. She is co-founder, producer and filmmaker at C.R.I.M. in Lisbon since 2003. Her research interests include film-philosophy, artistic research in film and digital arts.

Nélio Conceição (PhD, NOVA University Lisbon, 2013) is a research fellow at IFILNOVA, where he coordinates the CULTURELAB. His research focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with recent work addressing Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and topics within the philosophy of photography, film-philosophy, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of the city. He has published articles in journals such as Eidos, Kriterion, the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology and Aisthesis and co-edited the volumes Aesthetics and Values: Contemporary Perspectives (Mimesis International, 2021), Conceptual Figures of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration (IFILNOVA, 2021) and Planos de pormenor: leituras críticas sobre a experiência da cidade (Húmus, 2023).

Patrícia Castello Branco is a researcher and coordinator of CINELAB-Laboratory of Cinema & Philosophy, IFILNOVA. She published dozens of essays and book chapters, in national and international publishers and is author of the book Image, Body, Technology. The Haptic Function of New Technological Images (2013). Central to her research is a dialogue between Philosophy and Cinema. She is co-editor and co-founder of the scientific journal Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image. Her research interests include Cinema & Philosophy; Film Theories; Ethical and Aesthetic Values of New technologies; Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art; Art and Body; Haptic Visuality; Critical Posthumanism.

Marco Grosoli has been an Assistant Professor at Habib University (Karachi, Pakistan; 2016-2021), and a Research Fellow at the University of Kent in Canterbury (2012-2015, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow), at Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main (in both cases in 2022, as an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher) and at Università di Bologna (2023), where he also earned his PhD in Film Studies in 2010. Along with several academic papers and book chapters, he has authored an Italian-language monograph on Béla Tarr, and a book on the early days of French politique des auteurs (Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory, Amsterdam University Press, 2018). As a film critic, he collaborates with various Italian film magazines, among which FilmTv, Gli Spietati and FilmIdee.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the FILM AND DEATH project, he is working on Catherine Malabou’s “destructive plasticity” and on the cinematic applications of this concept.

Vasco Baptista Marques received his PhD in Contemporary Philosophy from the University of Lisbon (2017), with a dissertation on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s metaphysics of time. His research interests include Film-Philosophy, the History of Metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Time, Neoplatonism and topics within Aesthetics and Film Criticism, with recent work addressing German Idealism, Guy Debord and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Throughout the years, he has published his research in journals such as Philosophica, Sophia and Trans/Form/Ação and in publishers such as Routledge or L’Herne. In addition, he has been a resident film critic at the weekly newspaper Expresso since 2005.

Lucas Ferraço Nassif holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a researcher in the ERC project FILM AND DEATH and an integrated member of CineLab - Laboratory of Cinema and Philosophy, part of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy, and a member of the Portuguese Center of Psychoanalysis. Director and editor of the films Reinforced Concrete, Being Boring, and Unfamiliar Ceiling/The Beast; and author of the book Missing Links, published by Barakunan, and awarded by the Association of Moving Image Researchers [AIM] in Portugal as the best monographic book of 2023. In 2025 his book Unconscious/Television was published by Becoming Press. Lucas Ferraço Nassif's investigations happen between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis, operating with the clinical approach to the unconscious that aims at the entanglement of art and the production of thought.

Pedro Inock is a transdisciplinary artist with a focus on video art, performance, and painting. His artistic and academic work revolves around the exploration and intersections of visual expression, phenomenon, deceleration, and death within the context of the experience of time. He completed his master’s degree in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon (2016) and currently works with Prospect Art-Los Angeles, where he serves as the Director of Programming and Curation for the 4th Wall Video Art Network program. Pedro is a doctoral candidate in the course of Artistic Studies-Art and Mediations at NOVA FCSH, under the guidance of Professor Susana Viegas. He is developing his thesis titled "Freeze-Frame, the phenomenon in potential in the interstices of the Image, the suspension of time as a remembrance for death in contemporary times". This research focuses on the frozen image and the study of the interstices between images, using photography, cinema, and the philosophy of image to map a space for an “absence”, contributing to the deepening of research on death, silence, and deceleration.

Tiago Cravidão is a PhD Candidate in Artistic Studies-Art and Mediations at NOVA FCSH. Prior to his BA in film, in the Portuguese Film School, he worked as an attorney. He got his MA in Cinematographic Studies from Lusófona University with a dissertation on the possibilities of a documental mise-en-scène. The work was supervised by Edmundo Cordeiro. He was awarded two Gulbenkian grants to produce the films No glance is by chance (2013) and The Seven Thousand Doors (2018). He is a certified Death Doula, and frequently works as first assistant director in feature films. His latest film, Ars Moriendi, explores the benefits of cinema in the context of end-of-life care, the major theme of his PhD investigation.

Diana Neiva is a PhD Student of Philosophy at the University of Minho. She was awarded an FCT Studentship to work on her doctoral project “Film as Philosophy: philosophizing through cinematic thought experiments” supervised by Vítor Moura, Susana Viegas and Tom McClelland. She obtained her MA in Contemporary Philosophy from the University of Porto, with a dissertation about film as philosophy and metaphilosophy, supervised by Sofia Miguens and Thomas Wartenberg. Co-editor of the book Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides and has been conducting research on film as philosophy.

Natacha Muriel López Gallucci is Professor of Philosophy at the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Brazil, where she teaches in the undergraduate Philosophy program and serves as a permanent faculty member of the Postgraduate Program in Philosophy (PPGFIL, ICHCA–UFAL) and the Postgraduate Program in Literature and Linguistics (PPGLL–UFAL). She also collaborates with the Postgraduate Program in Arts (PPGArtes, ICA–UFC). She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) with a double degree from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and a PhD in Multimedia also from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). She completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Arts at ICA–UFC (PNPD/CAPES). She also holds an International Certificate in Afro-Latin American Studies from Harvard University (USA) and has formal training in psychoanalysis. An audiovisual creator, choreographer, and interdisciplinary researcher, her work explores philosophy, cinema, performance, memory, and contemporary Latin American culture, with a particular focus on cinema as philosophical experimentation. She coordinates the FiloMove Research Group: Philosophies, Arts, and Latin American Aesthetics (CNPq). She is affiliated with SOCINE (Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies), ANPOF (National Association of Graduate Studies in Philosophy), ANDA, and ICTMD. She has joined the FILM AND DEATH team as a Senior International Fellow (CNPq–DES) in 2026.

A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Daniel Conway received his BA in Philosophy and Economics from Tulane University and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. He has held faculty appointments at Stanford University, Harvard University, Penn State University, and, since 2006, Texas A&M University, where he is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Religious Studies and Film Studies, and Professor, by courtesy, in the School of Law and the Bush School of Government and Public Service. He also holds a leadership position in the Philosophy for Children initiative (P4C Texas). He has lectured and published widely on topics in post-Kantian European philosophy, American philosophy, political theory, aesthetics (especially film and literature), ethics, religion, education, and genocide studies. During his research residency in Lisbon, he will investigate the role of what he calls the “Nietzschean imperative” in contemporary science fiction films. Of particular interest in this respect are four recent films by Denis Villeneuve— Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Dune (2021), and Dune, Part Two (2024) —wherein the director reckons the psychological and social costs borne by those of his characters who strive, whether successfully or in vain, to prevent the threatened extermination of the human species.

Byron Davies is a researcher in philosophy, film programmer, and visual artist originally from the U.S. and a naturalized Mexican citizen. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain, where he is conducting the research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film” (2024-26). From 2018 to 2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and just before that, he completed his PhD in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is a member of the film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), based in Oaxaca, Mexico. Davies's writings on film and media have been published in October, Screen, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Millenium Film Journal, The Baffler, and Los Experimentos, among other places.

Gülce Zeynep Bektaş is a Master’s student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Yeditepe University. She received a BA in Humanities and Social Sciences with a minor in Psychology from Işık University. Previously, she worked on the Narrate Project, a European Union–funded initiative focused on the digitalization of cultural heritage. Her research interests are gender and cultural studies.

Farshad Zahedi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication of the University of Carlos III of Madrid. His research interests include Iranian cinema and cultural studies, aesthetic roots, gender representations, psychoanalytic criticism, film theories, history of Iranian independent cinema. He teaches Moving Image History and Film Studies. He is a visiting researcher at NOVA University Lisbon under the Erasmus+ Mobility Agreement Staff Mobility For Training.

Ingrid Rodrigues Gonçalves is a Brazilian PhD student in Education at the School of Education from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (PPGEdu/UFRGS). She has been studying autobiographical documentaries with an interdisciplinary approach to think about an intersection between audiovisual images, archives and education. Master's degree in Education and Bachelor's degree in Public Policy Management – both by Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She is the student from the School of Education (UFRGS) awarded with a one-month training period funded by the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) to stay at NOVA University Lisbon, with supervision of Professor Susana Viegas as part of the Film and Death Project. Personal website: bit.ly/ingridrg.

João Mourão joined the project's team as research manager in 2025. He was a member of Nova Institute of Philosophy's research management team from 2022 to 2024. He holds a BA and a postgraduate diploma in Philosophy from NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities  (NOVA FCSH).