Michael Hrebeniak is Lecturer in Film Poetics at University College London. He is also the Founder and Convenor of the New School of the Anthropocene in collaboration with October Gallery, a counter-neoliberal experiment dedicated to confronting ecological emergency through the arts. He previously served as Director of Studies and Lecturer in English for Wolfson and Magdalene colleges over 15 years, convened the Literature & Visual Culture paper for the Faculty of English, and supervised many MPhil dissertations and PhD theses. Prior to this he was the first Lecturer in the Humanities and Jazz History at the Royal Academy of Music, and taught Metropolitan Studies at NYU London. He has also worked as an arts documentary film producer for Channel 4 and as a jazz musician and freelance journalist, publishing in the Guardian, Observer, Independent and Jazz – the Magazine.
Michael works at the interface of film and textual theory and practice and is concerned with the non-mimetic moving image as performance, interdisciplinary investigation and multi-modal installation. He is interested in questions of communal memory and dwelling in both urban and rural ecologies, with a particular concern for cultures of assembly and carnivalesque experience; and how cognitive intermediations of past and present are filmically represented. These themes have informed a range of publications on Beat writing, cinema, visual culture, jazz, ecopoetics and the 1968 uprisings, as well as his films on the medieval Stourbridge Fair in Cambridge (Stirbitch: An Imaginary, 2019) and the turbo-capitalist new ruins of Nine Elms (Carceral Polis, in progress). He is currently writing a book for the BFI on the BBC Arena strand.
