Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre bending gender hacking art practices. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with BRANDON (1998 – 99), the first web art commissioned and collected by Guggenheim Museum, New York. Crafting her own genre of Scifi New Queer Cinema, she has made 4 feature films, FRESH KILL (1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDØ (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she received the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. In early 2025, she presented a survey show KI$$ KI$$ at Haus der Kunst in Munich and a theatre performance Hagay Dreaming at Tate Modern, London. Currently she is working on LOVER LOVE, a mixed media installation for Leslie Lohman Museum opening in April 2026.
Manuel Schubert
Manuel Schubert, born 1984, Berlin, is a film critic who has been following the Pornfilmfestival Berlin for about fifteen years. His work stems from an obsessive love of cinema – a desire to understand what images do and to share those reflections with others. Writing has always been his core, yet over the years he has also organized small queer film festivals, worked in radio, and co-produced a podcast with film-gossip and performance legend Vaginal Davis. He is drawn to films that take risks and resist the logic of the markets. His approach to film criticism – especially within the context of a Pornfilmfestival – is open, curious, and deliberately uncompromising, guided by the belief that every image also speaks about the world that makes it possible – and the one it mirrors.
Photo: Wolfgang Borrs
Zahra Stardust
Dr Zahra Stardust is a queer femme writer, performer, artist and scholar. She is a former Penthouse Pet, Hustler Honey, Australian Adult Star, and Feminist Porn Awards Heartthrob of the Year, and has toured internationally as a pole dance instructor, trapeze artist and sex educator. Her first bookIndie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press, 2024) explored the politics of online sexual content moderation, based on her PhD thesis. She has published in books such as Queer Sex Work, Coming out Like a Porn Star, and the DIY Porn Handbook.
Zahra is an academic at the Queensland University of Technology and is on the Sexual Health and Wellbeing Advisory Group for the World Health Organisation and the Sexual Rights Committee of the World Association for Sexual Health.
