Cerise Howard

Film Critic, Australia

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.