Postdoctoral Fellow

Research interests: transnational feminist theories and histories, queer theory, feminist methodologies and pedagogies, New York art world between 1960 and 1990, radical and experimental art practices, politics of labour in the arts, conceptualism, artist writings.

Mikhel Proulx is the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Vulnerable Media Lab. Mikhel is a historian of contemporary Canadian art and digital culture. He recently defended his doctoral dissertation—a study of network-based art by Canadian women—which was awarded the 2022 Leonardo Journal top thesis prize. His research considers network culture from queer-feminist and settler-colonial perspectives, and has been recently presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute; the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York; Goldsmith’s College, London; Yale University; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In recent projects, he has collaborated with the artists Margaret Dragu, Skawennati, Anna Boghiguian, Vera Frenkel, Anna Banana, and Rita McKeough. His forthcoming book—part of the Queer Films Classics series—considers how Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret represents Queer sexualities of Weimar Berlin. 

Darien Sánchez Nicolás, our new Postdoctoral Fellow in the VML, is working on minor archives and radical distribution practices in the Americas. He is currently working with Marilu Mallet (Unfinished Diary and much more), the Chilean-Canadian filmmaker, helping to organize and find a home for her archive in Montreal.

Darien Sánchez Nicolás holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema of Concordia University. His doctoral dissertation, Cinematic Voyages: Québécois Transnational Filmmaking and Cuban Domesticity examined the relationships between international tourism, transnational film production and homemaking in the island. He is a cross-appointed instructor in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Philosophies and Religions departments at John Abbott College, Montréal, Canada. He has worked as film pre-screener and programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, Latinarte Festival and the South Asian International Film Festival of Montréal, amongst others. He has received scholarships from Mexico’s National Council of Sciences and Technology (CONACYT), the Foundation DeSève Fellowship, the MITACS Globalink Research Award, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec–Société et Culture scholarship. Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University’s Vulnerable Media Lab.