Jenna Ng

Jenna Ng was awarded a PhD in Film Studies in February 2009 from University College London (UCL), funded by the UCL Graduate School Research Scholarship and the Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS) Award. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Mutations of Pastness: Time, Cinema, Ontology”, investigates how recent digital technologies of cinema—digital video, CGI, virtual cinematography and motion capture—reconfigure the nature (and, in turn, temporalities) of the moving image; her thesis abstract was recently ranked by a peer review panelist as one of the top abstracts in the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) Database and has been invited to be published in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA). Ng is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden (dually affiliated with the Department of Culture and Media), where she is working on a book project about presence and embodiment in digital media, including virtual worlds. She has given lectures and seminars on machinima theory, and is also editing a collection of essays on machinima, titled Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds, in which machinima is examined in relation to, among others, teaching and pedagogical issues. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal, 16:9, Rouge, as well as various essay anthologies.