Quan Zhang

My earliest memory of fear was the Millennium Bug (or the Y2K Bug), when society was warned that all we hold precious could collapse due to a calendar desynchronization. It spoke to the era of my upbringing and a way of understanding the world that seemed to endure ever since: a profound awareness of the inherent materiality of our constructed world.

After graduating with four years of heavy theoretical training, I threw myself into the exciting world of filmmaking to finally 'touch material.' I put myself through film school, (ghost)wrote TV episodes, and produced award-winning projects that have, accordingly, 'clicked' for some. Then, I wanted to pivot back to theory again. If I were to describe it, my interest has always been in the back-and-forth between theory and practice, until I discovered the compelling development of videographic criticism in academia over the last decade. Miraculously, it bridged both of my visions.

From there, I was fortunate to participate in several most caring, collaborative and generative workshops, including 'Embodying the Video Essay' at Bowdoin College (2023) and the 'Reframe the Argument' Graduate Student Workshop at the University of Notre Dame (2025). These communities gave me both the strength and the inspiration to carry my vision forward into my doctoral studies and broader academic engagement. Since, my work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, and I was nominated as an 'emerging voice' in Sight and Sound’s 'The Best Video Essays of 2024' poll.

Continuing into my doctoral studies, I plan to keep wielding videographic criticism as my sharpest tool, while situating it within the broader field of Practice Research, with the firm belief that thinking materially still has much to offer to our understanding of film and media.

I'm currently developing a new Practice Research methodology from the ground up, which I've titled 'Critical Scouting Reels.'

Think of a location scouting reel as a 'real estate video' for film directors. These images/videos/documents are typically created by location scouts who must follow specific professional standards in filmmaking to show decision makers how a real-world place can be used to build a fictional one. I repurpose this industry tool by materially dealing with the media: making, breaking, editing, re-editing, re-mixing, and, of course, video-essaying it. Through this active handling, I can examine the exact power structures that produce these images and turn the scouting reel into a 'critical lens' for assessing the bigger socio-political world.

My approach brings together theory/practice, creativity/operativity, and deformation/generation, emphasizing a particular attunement to the tacit knowledge found in the doing to drive the inquiry. I expect the first major phase of this project to take three years, over the course of my PhD at Leeds, culminating in a feature-length essay film.

However, as the nature of a Practice Research project dictates, it means I will be working through a series of smaller, reflexive pratice rather than just jumping to the final film, and I look for ideas in:

• Videographic Criticism
• Chinese Film History
• Archival Research
• Horror Studies
• Production Studies, focusing on location scouts' work
• Immersive Technologies

Fun Fact

My initials are two of the most redundant letters in the alphabet, so I’m thinking of adding a middle name starting with X to complete the set.