Anuj Vaidya is a media maker, curator, and educator, who is currently pursuing his doctorate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. His praxis engages a diverse range of forms and strategies that include theater and performance, multi-media installation, story-telling, social practice, curatorial practice, arts education, and artivism. Deeply invested in collaboration, Vaidya seeks to break down the divide between artist and audience by engaging them not only as content consumers but also as co-creators through participatory processes. His project, Forest Tales, is a femi-queer SF eco-cinema retelling that swims in the South Asian Sitayana epic tradition. As a speculative cinema project, it not only narrates eco-tales at the edge of the sixth extinction, but also reimagines the cinematic process/apparatus, offering an imagined cinema instead and revealing the cinematic as a corporeal and land-based practice. Vaidya’s artistic practice is complemented by two decades of curatorial (3rd i Films, Pacific Film Archive) and pedagogical practice (Street-Level Youth Media in Chicago, Montclair State University in New Jersey). For more information on his pedagogy and practice, please visit: www.handspuncinema.wordpress.com