Abbie Phelps lives in Roseville and works in publishing. The Trylon is quite possibly her favorite place in the world.
Adam Loomis is an animation and video artist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is also an organizer and participant of HELLAVISION TELEVISION ANIMATION SHOW, a volunteer at the Trylon Cinema, and a former short films programmer for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. See more of his work here: https://www.adamloomis.com/.
Ahmed AbdulMageed is an Egyptian-Palestinian aspiring film & media scholar. He obtained his BA from St. Olaf College in 2020, double-majoring in Film & Media Studies and Russian Area Studies. Ahmed is currently the film programming coordinator at Mizna.
Alec Gruba is a home-recording artist and director and producer of the Minneapolis Cable Access show PRIORITY (2009-2018).
Alexander Gray is a 30-something-year-old native of Pittsburgh who has spent time in Japan, Minnesota, and Northern California. A graduate of Macalester College in Saint Paul, he has worked as a Japanese translator, a civil servant, and (unfortunately) a tech minion. He likes black cats.
Alex Kies is a writer in the Twin Cities. In addition to being a lifelong Godzilla fan, he has been going to the Trylon since it opened its doors.
Alisha Robberstad is a woman with arms, crooked teeth, and ten toenails. A skinny dipper, film watcher, and a collector of records with dicks on the covers.
Allison Vincent is an award-winning performer, director, writer, deviser, and educator based in the Twin Cities. She’s a teaching specialist in the Writing Studies and Theater Arts and Dance Departments at the University of Minnesota and a theater instructor for Augsburg University. Her fiction has been previously published in various literary magazines and anthologies and tends toward the spooky side of things. Allison is a 2022 Pillsbury House and Theater Naked Stages Fellow, a 2023 Everwood Farmstead Fellow, and a 2023 Loft Literary Center/MISA Fellow. She lives in St. Paul, MN, with her wife, Leslie, and their dog, Murphy.
Amelia Foster is a librarian and letterpress printer living in Minneapolis.
Andrea Buiser is a Chicago native and now lives in Saint Paul. One time, they got tendonitis in their wrist from playing too much pinball. Andrea is a bit of a sentimental weirdo that will always love pro wrestling, writing letters, trivia night, and cooking Filipino food.
Andrew Neill is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster who lives in Minneapolis with his partner and their Goldendoodle Winnie. Andrew makes up one-third of Two Jackets Productions, a media production company that once made a movie about Santa Claus werewolves, and a podcast called Sham Fiction, where they wrote fanfiction about stuff they’d never seen before. Check out those projects and more at twojackets.com, and follow Andrew on Letterboxd.
Ann Romine first fell in love with the movies at the Bijou on the University of Minnesota campus in the late 1980s, watching films of Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen & Andrei Tarkovsky, among others. A Minneapolis native, Ann has volunteered at the former U Film Society and Oak Street Cinema, and at the Trylon Cinema since 2009 (back when it was a Micro Cinema.) A lover of all genres, she is especially fond of crime stories, period dramas, and movies of the 1970s, Saturday Night Fever being a favorite. Her other pastimes include gardening and tap dancing.
Azra Thakur is an aspiring writer from Minnesota who loves watching films, especially stylish ones that aren’t in English (at the moment this blurb was drafted—stay tuned for the next phase). She has degrees in English and public health. In her downtime, she likes trying new recipes in the kitchen and taking pictures.
Benjamin Jarman watched a lot of movies back in the day before he was sidetracked. Now he is ready to dig in again.
Benjamin Savard is a writer and video editor who has been volunteering at the Trylon since 2017. He studied film and media culture at Middlebury College and the University of Edinburgh, but still doesn’t know what “media culture” means. He has kept a detailed spreadsheet of all the media he consumes since 2013. He has watched 873 movies in that time. His favorite people in the film world are Agnès Varda, Mike Leigh, Barbara Stanwyck, Charlie Chaplin, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ask him about his cat.
Betsy Midnight is a nonprofit education entrepreneur who unwinds by watching movies at her sewing table. The first movie she and her spouse, Justin, watched together was Boogie Nights at the Lagoon back in 1997; she was only 15 at the time and got in big trouble with her Mom. Betsy and Justin collect and write about movies together now; for more, check out midnightmovietrain.com.
Bob Aulert is a native Chicagoan (Bears and Cubs fan, natch) who moved to The Great White North in 1984. He lives in St. Paul but ventures to Minneapolis without undue incident and enjoys the Twin Cities’ vibrant arts and film scene. His film reviews have been published by the San Francisco-based website culturevulture.net.
Brad Stiffler is an adjunct instructor of media and cultural studies at several local institutions of higher learning who one day hopes to find a box of money.
Brogan Earney is an aspiring filmmaker from St. Paul, who in his free time enjoys catching vibes at breweries and persistently updating his letterboxd (@broganearney).
Caitlyn Dibble has been a Trylon volunteer since 2015. She’s a chronic movie-cryer, part-time barista and current student in environmental science. She loves pre-9/11 blockbusters, existentialist movies about spies, Anthony Perkins’ nervous energy, all kinds of westerns and that time Ingrid Bergman went tuna fishing in Stromboli. She hates most films that can be described as “sensual” or that contain too many mouth noises.
Caitlyn Speier is a professional part-time job-haver-turned-receptionist who, on an average day, can be found bopping around live events in the Twin Cities, walking her dog, organizing with the Anti-War Committee, teaching swimming lessons, or forcing all of her friends into a movie theater. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in English and Philopsophy in 2022 and is doing her best to make the most of it! You can find more of her writing at caitlynspeier.com 🙂
Caroline Rutkiewicz is a Minnesotan and a 22-year-old, film-degree-holding, slightly confused artist. Trying all sorts of art forms from film to digital art to clothing, she will always gravitate toward unhinged women, art that leaves you questioning yourself, and re-consuming childhood favorites for any sense of comfort.
Casey Jarrin is a writer, painter, educator, survivor, outrageous dreamer, and co-founder of the Late Night Diner poetry collective. Her poems and essays on art as an empathy machine appear in Bright Lights Film, Washington Square Review, Banshee, Poetry Ireland, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the Walker Art Center’s Third Man Project and two 2023 anthologies: Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces and Like Flyering for the Revolution: Verve Anthology of Protest. Raised in NYC, she taught literature and film at Macalester College before founding Live Mind Learning in 2015. She lives in Saint Paul with her black cat Lucius and partner Erik. www.caseyjarrin.com
Celia Mattison (@CeliaMattison) is a volunteer emeritus living in Brooklyn. You can read her monthly newsletter about DVDs and other dead media.
Charlie Couture (@zombieoncanvas) is an emerging artist based out of St Paul. Each piece of his work is a love letter to the horror and cult films from video stores of his childhood. It can be seen at comic cons and gallery shows throughout the Midwest.
Chelli Riddiough is a writer and editor. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and is currently working on a novel.
Chris Polley is an English, Film Studies, and Journalism teacher at Columbia Heights High School
and co-host of the Film Trace podcast.
Chris Ryba-Tures (he/they) lives on the West Side of Saint Paul.
Cole Seidl is a filmmaker, traveler, and educator. He received his MFA at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and has lived and worked in Palestine, France, and Taiwan. As a result he now has a lifelong interest in films from these countries. He is also committed to playing the banjo and the game of bridge without seeming to ever grow in skill level.
Collier White (Trylon volunteer emeritus) now resides in Long Beach, CA, where he’s surrounded by movie settings, (like the filthy L.A. River), and movie people, (Evan Peters drives a Prius), but where there isn’t a theater as cool as the Trylon. A graduate of the University of Minnesota and a Danish film Folkehøjskole, he would tell you, “There’s no place like home,” but he only quotes Judy Garland when he’s been drinking.
Courtney Kowalke is a writer formerly from northeast Iowa and currently based out of Minneapolis. Kowalke’s most-watched movie is either Fiddler on the Roof (1971) or Wayne’s World (1992), although if she wants to impress somebody, she says it’s Rear Window (1954).
Dan Howard was born (in 1995) and raised in Minnesota. His love for film was imbedded in him at an early age and he has been writing from the age of five years old—purely for fun—and realized at age 12 that he wants to make movies. After dropping out of music school, Dan found his way back to writing when he was 18. Since then, Dan has made his first short film, Psychlight, and acted in two indie horror films: The Curse of Raven Heights and The Bride on the Bridge. Dan continues to pursue a career as a filmmaker while being an avid attendee and supporter of the Trylon Cinema.
Dan Murphy is a Twin Cities based visual artist, filmmaker, and musician. He’s currently interested in French Crime films of the 1960s and 70s, strange Polish films from the 1970s and 80s, and schlocky B-movies from any time at all.
Daniel Lawrence Aufmann is a Ph.D student in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where his research focuses on the connections between silent cinema and the politics of the American women’s suffrage movement. Originally from Cincinnati, OH, he holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on the topic of female action heroes in American silent film. His article “Silent Suffragists: Activism, Popular Cinema, and Women’s Rights in 1910s America” appeared in Volume 6 of Zapruder World.
Dan McCabe is a Twin Cities science fiction writer, film writer, and attorney. Since 2012, he’s regularly maintained his own film and television website, Cinema Grandcanyonscope, where he writes about movie history, recent movies, and TV shows. Read more of his work on his website.
Doug Carmody lives in Minneapolis. His favorite movie is The Shining, but he likes most of the other ones too.
Dylan Hawthorn grew up in southern Missouri; moved to Minnesota to go to St. Olaf College and study Greek and Latin, Film Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies; and now lives in Minneapolis. He enjoys playing bass clarinet with the South High Community Band, geocaching with his partner Misha, and snuggling with their cats Mousey and Cicero. Follow him on Letterboxd (@dyllectable) to see how many more times he can log Hackers (1995)—as of this writing, he’s at seven.
Eli Holm is a student, swimmer, aspiring writer and major of something? at St. Cloud State University, which he will be attending from 2023 and beyond. He watches too many movies, but mainly horror, slow cinema, experimental films and obscure pinkus. You can read his writing on Letterboxd @eliholmie, but hopefully in more places soon. He also hosts a podcast called “the dog days of movies.”
Ed Dykhuizen lives in St. Paul with his wife and three kids. He is currently writing a book about movies, and has written and self-published a book called “The Baseball Hall of Fame Corrected” under the nom de plume Eddie Daniels. He also leads the Weird Movie Club Twin Cities, a meet-up group that screens and discusses movies listed on the website 366 Weird Movies.
Finn Odum is somewhere out there shouting at the sun for some reason.
Greg Hunter is an arts writer and a graphic novel editor based in Minneapolis. He is kind to animals, serious about breakfast, and a fan of any movie starring Toshiro Mifune or Harry Dean Stanton.
Hannah Baxter works in marketing and communications. Her favorite things in the Twin Cities are the Trylon and the parks system, in that order.
J.R. Jones is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and author of The Lives of Robert Ryan. From 2008 to 2018 he was film critic for the Chicago Reader, but he now lives in Minneapolis.
Jake Rudegeair writes about ghosts, robots, and old movies from his madcap laboratory in Minneapolis, MN. He received his BA in philosophy from Hamline University, with a focus on metaphysics and the outer limits of knowledge. He’s written scripts for animation, short essays and reviews for local organizations, and comics (which he also illustrates.) After a bizarre journey through the professional sausage grinder, he found his home at Next Day Animations, writing and producing content for a bevy of enthralling clients. When not creating, you may find him achieving full-blown goofball status in attempts to entertain his wife, infant son, and overly critical German Shepherd.
Jasper Nordin graduated from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2024 with a B.A. in History. While there, he was an organizer with the UMN chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. UMN SDS was apart of the UMN Divest coalition, which organized the recent Gaza Solidarity encampment this last spring semester. After graduation he became a UPS Teamster and a member of Minnesota Workers United.
Jay Ditzer is a former journalist and editor who now works in advertising. He fancies himself a creative person with a wide variety of cultural interests and artistic passions, which is a polite way of saying “dilettante.” He lives in South Minneapolis with his wife, cat, and dog. Find him on Letterboxd under J DTZR.
Jeremy Meckler is the co-author of Still Dots, a micro-analysis of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a contributor to World Film Locations: Cleveland, and was a founding editor of the film journal Joyless Creatures (RIP). He is a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program, where his work centers on the relationship between avant garde film and video and mass culture.
Jeremy Noble is a Minneapolis resident. He watches things repeatedly in a search for comfort in the same way children suck their thumb. He shares his apartment with one dog and probably too many screens.
Jeremy Warden is a millennial musician, Minnesota native, and college dropout. Formerly a touring artist, booking agent, and label head, he now works in the guitar pedal industry at Chase Bliss in Minneapolis while continuing to record and experiment with his band Double Grave and with friends from time to time. A lifelong enthusiast of film and animation, Warden also enjoys reality TV, culture commentary, sports, wildlife, puzzles, cocktails, and any sort of creative work to be consumed both high and lowbrow. He currently lives in Saint Paul with his wife, two cats, and dog.
A thick, greying fog of vicious gastrointestinal distress, Jesse Lawson has haunted the Trylon an estimated 100+ times since 2011. He dwells ever in the doomed obscurity of dissertation writing, toiling under a doctoral program whose tormented title is uttered only by those who, when asked what they study, wish to immediately change the subject.
Joe Midthun was born in a small mining town in East Central Minnesota. He attended the Perpich Center for Arts Education, studied screenwriting at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, and film production at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author and co-creator of World Book’s Building Blocks educational comic series. He lives and works in Minneapolis as a(n) _______________ with emphasis in fine art and visual effects for film.
John Blair is movie lover with a degree in film that somehow led to working in marketing. Two of his fondest movie-going memories are seeing Barry Lyndon and Lawrence of Arabia on the Trylon’s big screen. Although a fan of a wide range of films and filmmakers, his interest lately has veered towards Hollywood movies of the 1980s and 1990s, possibly caused by the podcasts You Must Remember This and This Had Oscar Buzz. He lives with his partner and two cats in Minneapolis.
John Costello received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.
Justin Ayd is a Minneapolis-based documentary filmmaker, film specialist, projectionist for the Walker Art Center, and founder of the blood cancer and healthcare community organization Engines of Solidarity.
Justin Midnight is a former manager of a North Carolina Hollywood Video and a lifelong lover of movies, from French New Wave to Troma. He lives in Northeast, where he runs after-school programs for middle schoolers as he works to gradually improve what is already a pretty awesome film collection (long live physical media!). For more filmic celebrations and skewerings from Justin, or if you want to borrow a movie, check out midnightmovietrain.com.
Kevin Maher is the creator of the classic film blog Top10FilmLists.com. Just recently he opened a non-profit screening room in Detroit called Motor City Cinema Society that features all-film programming on 16mm collector prints. He also helps program for local non-profit theatres in Michigan. Kevin lives in Troy, MI. The Trylon is a favorite theatre from his time visiting Minneapolis for work.
Lamia Abukhadra is an artist and writer based in Minneapolis and Beirut. Her practice studies and confronts the irrational truths present within settler colonial power structures, derived from imaginaries, ethoses, and ontological tools, and their extractive repercussions. Using Palestine as a microcosm of urgency and resistance, she embeds speculative frameworks, intuited from practices present long before the settler colonial project. Her works bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.
Lars Johnson is a film projection enthusiast passionate about the preservation of cinema and loves to frequent the Trylon for 35mm screenings, the latest being Blade Runner earlier this year. His favorite movie has remained The Shining since it scared the crap out of him at 12 years old. He can be found wherever 35 or 70mm is being shown, including at the Quentin Tarantino-owned New Beverly in Los Angeles.
Liz Robau lives in Minneapolis.
Lucas Hardwick works a blue collar job by day, but spends his breaks, lunches, and early mornings fulfilling his higher purpose researching and writing about film. You can find his contributions at the Apes On Film blog, and in Screem and We Belong Dead magazines. Lucas also dabbles in short horror screenwriting and participates in several screenwriting contests each year. Lucas lives in Evansville, IN with his wife Rachel and his son Holden. Look for Lucas’s scripts on Coverfly and his monthly watchlists on Letterboxd.
Lucas Vonasek is a writer, actor, improviser, and part-time game show host. When he’s not doing any of those things, he’s probably walking his dog, Gordy, or trying to perfect his cacio e pepe recipe while muttering to himself “Hmm…not enough cheese.” He currently lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Lukas Lock-Scamp is a student at Macalester College who aspires to one day know what he wants to do and to perhaps find fun in the small things before this major discovery.
Luke Mosher is a librarian and Trylon superfan who grew up in Athens, GA and now lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and dog, where he is cold all the time. He remains confused about his paternal lineage after a lifetime of hearing “Luke, I am your father” from hundreds of different people. Besides watching too many movies, he enjoys running, playing guitar, and turning off the motion smoothing on other people’s TVs. Please do tell him your favorite book.
Malcolm Cooke is a Trylon volunteer and Werner Herzog enthusiast. Occasionally, he writes.
Maria Gomez has been a volunteer with Trylon since 2010, has 3 cats, and resides in Saint Paul. She enjoys movies of all genres and ages that vary from classic comedies to dark fantasy. A few of her favorite film makers and personalities are Charlie Chaplin, James Wan, Guillermo Del Toro, Doug Jones, and Mel Brooks. Quotes are also a personal fave: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” – Charlie Chaplin
Matt Clark has been living and watching movies in Minneapolis since his days working at the Uptown, haunting the aisles of Nicollet Village Video, or tearing tickets at the occasional Asian Media Access midnight show. He now rambles infrequently about crime films, genre obscurities, and dummy drops at kino-ventura.blogspot.com/.
Matt Levine is a freelance novelist, film critic, and screenwriter based in St. Paul. He’s been a Trylon volunteer since 2011 and an insatiable movie fan since about 1992. His ideal day consists of bike riding, throwing a tennis ball around in a lake, buying some records, and finishing up at an area movie theater for anything from Kenji Mizoguchi to Kelly Reichardt.
Matthew Christensen is a Twin Cities native currently living in Karuizawa, Japan where
he teaches film and theater at United World College, ISAK Japan in Nagano prefecture.
Matthew Lambert is a journalist-turned-communications specialist for a nonprofit in Rochester, Minnesota. As a reporter and editor covering every beat small-town newspapers have to offer, Matthew has always enjoyed writing, but loved covering the arts and specifically movies. When Matthew wasn’t studying the storytelling of Jackie MacMullan and Wright Thompson, he was watching movies for his film minor at Winona State University. His Letterboxd (@MattLambert) Top 4 are The Master, The Departed, Mad Max: Fury Road and Written on the Wind.
Matthew Tchepikova-Treon is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota where he teaches courses on pop culture, cinema, literature, and media. He is currently writing his dissertation: “X-Rated Sound: One-hundred Years of 1972.” Additional writing of his appears in Jump Cut, Flow, and the (forthcoming) collected volume The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media (edited by Paul Reinsch & Laurel Westrup, Routledge University Press). He also co-founded and continues to operate the Moving Image, Media, & Sound research collaborative with UMN’s Institute for Advanced Study. Approximately 87% of his one-hundred favorite films at any given time could be classified as some version of horror cinema.
MH Rowe‘s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Missouri Review, Florida Review, Lit Hub, The Millions, and have been reprinted in Junior Great Books 8. Visit him online at mh-rowe.com, or in Minneapolis, not too far from the Trylon.
Mia McGill is a Korean-American writer and nonprofit communications specialist based in Minneapolis. Mia also hosts bar trivia around town and has been known to espouse movie hot takes on their Letterboxd, their film blog, and national television.
Michael Lockhart is a senior at Macalester College in Saint Paul, majoring in media cultural studies and philosophy. He has a background in film analysis through his coursework at Macalester and as a volunteer on the selection committee for the 2018 Minneapolis Saint Paul International Film Festival.
Michael Popham is a communications manager with Minnesota Public Radio in Saint Paul. He has been a Trylon volunteer since 2010. He has written numerous pieces for Perisphere, the blog of the Trylon Cinema, and served as editor from 2015 – 2016. He scripted the award winning radio series Primitive James and currently writes about film for The Horror Incorporated Project (horrorincorporated.com).
Michael Wellvang is an experimental filmmaker and writer, who has worked in film crews around the country. He lives in Minneapolis.
Michelle Baroody has been a volunteer at the Trylon since 2013. She holds a PhD in comparative lit from UMN, where she taught film and literature classes, and she is the programmer of Mizna’s Film Series at the Trylon and the annual Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. She loves watching and analyzing films, and she hopes to one day build an archive of film prints and ephemera under the Trylon’s projection booth. Her favorite Trylon viewing experiences include The Sparrow, Point Break, Kings of the Road, Sweetie, 3 Women and Soleil O.
Natalie Marlin is a film and music writer based near Minneapolis. She has written for outlets including Paste Magazine, Pitchfork, Little White Lies, Reverse Shot, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and more. She likes Technicolor, DV cinematography, and the films of Takashi Miike.
Nate Logsdon is an indexer and writer in St. Paul.
Nazeeh Alghazawneh is a Palestinian film writer and programmer. He runs awtthaaus.com, a local monthly film calendar in the Twin Cities.
Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns is a queer writer, artist, and educator of Scandinavian descent who works to make the invisible, visible. Nicole enjoys cavorting with insects, eating fibrous fruit, and collecting misplaced postal rubber bands.
Nick Kouhi is a freelance film programmer and film critic. An avid cinephile, Nick’s interests include East Asian Cinema, particularly Iranian films, as well as classic melodrama and American Independent films. He recently earned his Master of Arts in Programming and Curation at the National Film & Television School in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to What If Cinema?, a website co-founded with fellow programmers hailing from three other countries around the world. Nick has also written for Sight & Sound Magazine, Radical Art Review, and Kouhi Films.
Olga Tchepikova-Treon currently teaches Film History and Aesthetics in New York. She gets most excited about Trylon’s weird, b-movie, and cult film programming and is a keen observer and sometimes lay practitioner of the now almost obsolete craft of analogue theatrical film projection.
Patrick Clifford would rather be watching movies. He also enjoys conversations with his dog, listening to his wife pronounce double-R’s in Spanish, and being in the kitchen while his daughter makes a sandwich.
Penny Folger is a freelance writer and film historian who resides in Los Angeles. She is on the writing team for The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA, Orange County’s only 501(c)(3) non-profit art house cinema. She is also a rhythm guitarist for the Irish ensemble Magickly Delishus, a Mexican food enthusiast and a friend to all cats. You can read more of her work here: thefridacinema.org/author/penny_folger/
Phil Kolas is a comedian who lives in Minneapolis. It took him 19 years to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. And his mom said he’d “make a great veterinarian.”
Rowan A. Smith is a writer and musician from St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied writing at Augsburg University and his writing has been published in Straylight, Black Hearts, and The Unrorean. Over a dozen albums of his music are available on his Bandcamp. He spends most of his free time watching movies and cuddling with cats.
Ryan Sanderson (McCorquodale on Letterboxd) is a Twin Cities-based writer and occasional filmmaker. He writes television reviews at Twin Cities Geek and general nonfiction elsewhere, but his first love will always be The Cinema, particularly (though by no means exclusively or even primarily) the films of Buster Keaton, Wes Anderson, Bong Joon-ho, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Greta Gerwig.
Sabrina Crews is a longtime Trylon acolyte and recent volunteer. Her most memorable experiences at the cinema include The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra live scoring Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, discovering Elliott Gould, every second Setsuko Hera was on screen during the Yasujirō Ozu series, a rare U.S. screening of The Mother and the Whore and that one time she accidentally burned the popcorn during her concessions shift for Valley Girl (and hasn’t since, Barry). Sabrina is certain the 1970s was the best decade for filmmaking but is making more of an effort to keep up with new releases.
Sam L. Landman‘s written erotic poetry about Rush, Minnesota Fringe shows about demented fans of The Smiths, a storytelling show about Prince saving his soul from Hell, speculative rock fiction about Spandau Ballet becoming homicidal supervillains, audio horror about David Lynch rooming with Peter Wolf (from J. Geils Band), a one-person show about working at Musicland, and a They Might Be Giants jukebox musical. He also wrote an article for the Trylon’s first zine that drew a correlation between Star Wars and Smokey & The Bandit. During the day, he’s a copywriter. At night, he’s usually acting in something.
Sophie Durbin is a multidisciplinary curator/artist/researcher/writer. From 2018-2022 she directed programming at Pancake House, an art space in south Minneapolis. She is a master’s student at the University of the Highlands and Islands – Orkney College, where her primary research interest is early medieval Scotland, but she enjoys expanding into the contemporary world when the opportunity arises. She has frequented the Trylon since 2015. Film favorites include all bad Tennessee Williams adaptations, Sandy Dennis, Desert Hearts, movies with negligible plots, dramas with small moments of horror, and, of course, Warren Oates.
Shivaun Watchorn has been a patron of the Trylon since it opened and a volunteer since 2017. She’s still learning about film. She enjoys editing writing about arts and culture and has written for a number of fanzines. She played on the Trylon softball team for two summers.
Steven Rybin is professor of film studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His books on film include Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema (2023), Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance (2020), Gestures of Love: Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2017), and Michael Mann: Crime Auteur (2013).
Ted Harwood has been a Trylon volunteer since 2016. He lives with his wife and daughter in Minneapolis and enjoys thinking and writing about film, music, video games, and soccer.
Terry Serres is a plant nerd, year-round bicyclist, unrepentant Francophile, and devoted dog dad. He works as a restoration ecologist for Landbridge Ecological. Like Agnès Varda, he is a purveyor of tree factoids. He’s waited a long time to watch on the big screen the films in the Varda series. His Letterboxd handle is CineQuaNon.
Thom Robertson received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He lives and breathes for AMAZING illustration, comics, film, and tabletop games. He excels in depicting fictional themes such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, and the supernatural. His clients include General Mills, Mojo Solo, TRYLON, NAQT, Creatis, Fantasy Flight Games, and the Friends of the Minnesota Orchestra. His work has been displayed at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
Timothy Zila’s stories have been published in American Fiction Volume 13, Gargoyle and The Wisconsin Review. He received an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota, where he was an honorable mention for the 2015 Gesell Award for fiction. He grew up in New Mexico and holds undergraduate degrees from the University of New Mexico. He lives in Minneapolis and works as a proofreader at an ad agency. You can reach him at timothyzila@gmail.com.
Todd Melby co-produced We Don’t Talk Like That: Fargo and the Midwest Psyche, an audio documentary about the 1996 Coen Brothers movie. He is also a reporter and podcast producer at American Public Media and is currently working on a book about Fargo, which will be published in 2020 by MNHS Press.
Tom Schroeder has completed sixteen animated films since 1990. His films have been broadcast on Independent Lens, the Sundance Channel, Canal + France and Spain,SBS in Australia, CBC in Canada and Pacific Voice in Japan. Tom also teaches animation at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Learn more about his work here: einausanimation.com.
Veda Lawrence is a clown and writer, primarily interested in how comedy can be a weapon in the rebellion against the absurd.
Yuval Klein is a high school student and cinephile. As a cinematic hobby, he writes reviews for arthouse films in the Instagram blog @fragments_of_film. A relatively small and spontaneous list of his favorite directors would include: John Cassavetes, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Abbas Kiarostami, Pedro Almodóvar, Agnès Varda, Jafar Panahi, and Ingmar Bergman.
Zach Jansen is an award-winning screenwriter living in Saint Paul. He has a B.A. in Screenwriting from Metropolitan State University (Saint Paul) and graduate degrees in Library and Information Science from Saint Catherine University (Saint Paul) and Film Studies from National University (San Diego). A true cinephile with eclectic tastes, his favorite films include Citizen Kane, They Live, Psycho, Dogville, Badlands, Jeanne Dielman, and Hot Rod. When not watching movies, writing movies, or writing about movies, he has the best of times enjoying the Twin Cities with his wife Bria and sons Evan and Noah.
Zach Staads (he/she) is a Minneapolis based film producer, performer, and non-professional clown with a deep love of atmosphere, negative space, and TTRPGs. While she could ramble on in this, check out her other work at zachstaads.com and newneighbor.co and never forget to always be truly, unabashedly lovely.
We would like to recognize our primary Perisphere Blog editors:
Michael Popham (2014-2017)
Michelle Baroody (2019-2022)
Olga Tchepikova-Treon (2022-Present), Content Editor
Finn Odum (2023-Present), Web Editor
We also thank the volunteer editors who have assisted over time:
Brad Stiffler, Matthew Tchepikova-Treon, Catherine Cavalier, and Shivaun Watchorn