VUCAVU is thrilled to welcome Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler and Marko Djurdjić, two new research interns to our team!

 

DIGITAL PROGRAMMING INTERN: IMAA Digital Skills For Youth Program (DS4Y) from the Canadian Government

Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler joins us in the role of Digital Programming Intern as part of IMAA's Digital Skills for Youth (DS4Y) program funded by the Government of Canada.

Stephanie is an arts administrator with a love of the moving image. She has worked in film and video in various capacities, most recently as the Distribution Coordinator at the Winnipeg Film Group. Stephanie is the creator of several independently published zines, as well as a co-founding member of the feminist arts collective, Sappho Zine (2012-2016). Sharing the joy of collaborative art-making with people of all ages delights her, and she has been developing, facilitating, and leading art workshops for over eight years. Stephanie is passionate about increasing accessibility in the arts sector, and believes that art is for everyone. 

As VUCAVU’s Digital Programming Intern, Stephanie will be researching accessibility-centred tools and approaches for online film, video and media art programming to improve usability and audience engagement. Stephanie will work to create a road map for VUCAVU and their programming partners to implement and use these tools, and create lists of resources and tips for artists. She is looking forward to researching the VUCAVU platform and other film and video programming initiatives to investigate creative and dynamic ways to activate our growing collection of media artworks.

IN-CLASS TESTING OF VUCAVU.com: MITACS Accelerate, In partnership with York University 

Marko Djurdjić (pronounced JOOR-JICH) is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was born in a country that no longer exists, which is always a fun piece of trivia to share at parties. He holds degrees from three prominent Canadian universities, which makes his parents very proud. Marko’s doctoral research is rooted in film, media education, anti-oppression, and spatiality, while his extracurricular interests are both wide-ranging and minute. Currently, he’s making up for lost time by going to lots of concerts, movies, and libraries, although he still misses teaching in a classroom, and gesticulating wildly therein. He hopes you’re all keeping safe and doing well.

Marko has been awarded a MITACS Accelerate grant to work with VUCAVU assisting in the application and beta-testing of a new VUCAVU function called Private Pages, which allows educators and users to create personalized, curated programs utilizing VUCAVU's extensive film library. For this in-class testing project, we will be collaborating with educators to develop the aforementioned program pages, to be used for assignments, projects, and screenings as the instructor sees fit.

Marko is very excited to bring VUCAVU's unique, artist-driven curatorial approach into classrooms, and looks forward to interacting with both educators and students (hopefully in-person!) once again.

 

VUCAVU thanks the following organizations for their support.

          
Image description: Five logos in a row, on far left is the Government of Canada with a Canadian flag in the top left corner, then an orange circle for the Independent Media Arts Alliance, third from the right is the Mitacs log in bold blue font, and fourth, is the logo for York University written in black text with a "U" in white atop a red square block. Lastly, the fifth logo is for the Canada Council for the Arts and is written in Black and White, there is a tree on the left side with a circle at its base and the name of the organization in English and French to the right of it.