Marie Sophie Beckmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. She holds a BA in Media and Cultural Studies (Düsseldorf), an MA in Curatorial Studies (Frankfurt/Main), and completed her PhD in 2021 as part of the DFG Research Training Group Configurations of Film at Goethe University Frankfurt on film practices in the New York downtown scene of the 1980s. Her texts have been published in Cinéma&Cie, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), and montage AV, among others. Her monograph Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of Transgression is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. In addition to her academic work, Marie Sophie Beckmann is an independent curator in the field of contemporary, audiovisual art and performance.

Sophia Gräfe is a Media and Cultural Studies scholar. Her long-standing interest is the history of useful film in the German-speaking area. This includes science film, with a particular focus on the history of behavioral biology, but also the surveillance films of the Stasi, the former East German secret service. Gräfe currently works at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. As an assistant curator and freelance writer she has worked with various media and experimental film festivals such as the transmediale festival, Werkleitz festival and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen as well as galleries and artist studios.