Dr. Maxa Zoller is the artistic director of the International Women’s Film Fest Dortmund+Cologne.

Maxa grew up in the rural Ahr Valley in West-Germany. After graduating from high school she worked in Paris and Rome. Her international career began in London in 1999, where she received her M.A. in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art thanks to a DAAD scholarship. In 2008 she completed her doctorate on the exhibition history of experimental film under the supervision of Ian Christie and Laura Mulvey at Birkbeck College (»Places of Projection: Re-contextualising the European Experimental Film Canon«). Her interest in the interrelationship between art and cinema has marked her academic career. She worked as a freelance film curator in London; from 2011-2013 she was Associate Curator of the London non-for-profit experimental film space no.w.here and organised various film programmes for Tate Modern, South London Gallery, BFI Southbank and FACT Liverpool. In 2014 she curated Anthony McCall’s solo exhibition at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. From 2014 to 2018 she was responsible for the film programme at Art Basel in Basel. As a lecturer, she taught transdisciplinary art and film history and theory at London’s Goldsmiths College and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as at the American University Cairo in Cairo, where she lived from 2013-2018. Maxa’s academic expertise lies primarily in the areas of feminist film history and epistomology, experimental film, expanded cinema, film and the body, the cinema of the MENA-region and film theory. In her publications with MIT, IB Tauris, JRP-Ringier and Hatje Verlag, she covers topics ranging from geopolitical context analysis of Western avant-garde and experimental film, its contexts of exhibition and historiography.

Her understanding of »expanded cinema« also informs her work as director of the IFFF Dortmund+Köln, where she initiated artist residencies and book publications. Under her leadership, the film programme became more international. The relaunch of the festival in 2021 presented a restructuring of the entire programme and the new sections Spot on, NRW! and IFFF Revisited. Maxa expanded the annual program with regular monthly events that are based on different collaborations.

Maxa is on the board of the Netzwerk Filmkultur NRW e. V.
She is jury member of the funding body Graduation Film at the Film and Media Foundation NRW.
She is a spokesperson for the independent film scene Dortmund. She represents the free art scene (Freie Szene) at the Committee for Culture, Sports and Leisure in the city of Dortmund.
Maxa is also a member of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).

Maxa lives in Dortmund with her two sons.

Christina Essenberger, M. A., is the Managing Director of Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln. During her studies of Literature and Art History at Bielefeld University she was active in the local independent art scene where she was to become the first DJane in a youth culture centre. She also worked at the Lichtwerk Cinema where she programmed classic Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and ’40s and films by female directors as well as arthouse and experimental film. For many years she was a board member of the Filmhaus Bielefeld e. V. Christina became the manager of several international dance and theatre festivals at the Theaterlabor Bielefeld before moving on to IFFF Dortmund+Köln  in 2007. Christina is co-founder of Netzwerk Filmkultur e.V. and board member of KINOaktiv of the independent film scene Cologne.

Christian Liemke is responsible for IFFF Dortmund+Köln film bookings and is on the festival’s organisational team. A film and cinema fan since childhood, he ran a successful blog about film, DVDs and Blu-ray discs for 12 years. After moving from OWL to Dortmund, in 2011 he got to know the film festival for the first time while attending, and later got a taste of the work behind the scenes during an internship while studying. He has been on the permanent staff at IFFF as our film booker since 2017.
He is also on the curator team for the Dortmunder Tresen-Filmfestival.

Since completing her studies in theatre, film and television studies, journalism and economics, this feminist film and media scholar has worked as a freelance curator, press officer and journalist. For almost 30 years, she has been collaborating with numerous festivals, institutions and female artists in Germany and beyond – including the Bobiennale, Bundesverband Kommunale Kinos (Federal Association of Municipal Cinemas), Deutsche Kinemathek, German Short Film Award, Dokumentarfilminitiative, Fidena, Filmbüro NW, Flying Broom Ankara, Goethe-Institutes, Emden-Norderney International Film Festival, Lünen Film Festival, Short Film Days, Maren Kroymann, nachtfrequenz, Radio Bremen, Schillertage Mannheim and Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. Central to her work is her long-standing involvement with the IFFF Dortmund + Köln, where she heads the International Feature Film Competition and the press department, and shares responsibility for the international industry meeting during the Berlinale and other special programmes. She is a cross-genre networker and co-founded the biennial Flinta* music festival Future Now in Wuppertal in 2020.

Grew up in the Ruhr. Spent a year in the cinemas of Paris and discovered her love for film. Studied film, television and theatre, Romance languages & literature and social psychology at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Worked on the Ruhr University’s student-run International Video Festival, and subsequently has worked for various film festivals (incl. the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Dok & Videofest Kassel) as well as a freelance curator and translator.

Marieke Steinhoff is a freelance film curator for Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln. She completed her studies in theatre, film and television, German and ethnology at the University of Cologne and in Rome, Italy. While studying, she wrote on a freelance basis for the German film magazine Schnitt, where she later became chief editor. She also became organisational head of Filmplus, the forum for film editing and montage art in Cologne, for two years. Since 2013 she has been working for the ifs internationale filmschule köln, including coordinating the teaching of film and media studies. She’s also involved in the »ifs-Begegnung« film and event series, as well as the film history series Filmgeschichten at the Filmforum NRW in Cologne’s Museum Ludwig. In her curatorial work, Marieke looks at aspects of film heritage and canonisation, archives and diversity as well as young German film.

Studied theatre, film and television as well as Romance and German literature (gaining an MA) at the Ruhr University Bochum, the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Glasgow. Since 1996, she has worked as a freelance film curator. She devises programmes, workshops, talks and ideas for various festivals and symposia in film and theatre, since 1996 mainly for femme totale / Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln.
She works in film and theatre as dramaturge, researcher, production manager and organiser. She hosts events, does press relations work, manages projects for the Nacht der Jugenkultur (youth culture event in North Rhine-Westphalia), and publishes work on radio and in print media. She also sits on international jury panels, including in Tel Aviv, Yerivan, Innsbruck, Prishtina, Seoul, Bozen, Taipei, Lessinia. As a regular member of the Transnationales Ensemble labsa in Dortmund, she has spent recent years looking more closely at the issue of attributions of identity. She has completed collaborative film projects and workshops, including I speak so you don’t speak for me. In 2018, she curated the film programme About Germany in order to reflect on how certain forms of exclusion and racism have built up in the realms of politics and media. This also includes looking into the past in order to frame the phenomenon of migration historically. In this context, a new perspective of East-West German history also emerged. Selected current programmes: Kultur@Gefängnis since 2015 in Germany’s Ruhr region | About Germany (IFFF 2018) | Wahnsinn. Widerstand.Wut – Ein fiebrig-feministisches Filmprogramm in drei Akten (Schillertage Mannheim2019 film festival) | In This Together (Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taipei)