Cerise Howard

Cerise Howard was appointed as Program Director of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in May 2023. She hails from Aotearoa New Zealand and has for several years been a co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque. She co-founded the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and was its Artistic Director from 2013 to 2018; she was also a co-founding member of tilde: Melbourne Trans and Gender Diverse Film Festival.

Since 2019 she has been a Studio Leader at RMIT University, specialising in incubating film festivals and interrogating the shortcomings of the canon. She is a longtime commentator and widely published writer on film, and on intersections of screen media, gender, sexuality and other matters; a regular broadcaster on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR, and was a member of the International Jury Board of the East-West: Golden Arch Awards, celebrating Eurasian cinema, for its three editions between 2018 and 2021.