Associate Professor Max Schleser

Biography

Max Schleser (BA Hons, MA Art and Media Practice with Distinction, PhD Westminster) is Associate Professor in Film and Television and a researcher in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies (CTMT) at Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia), Adobe Education Leader, Founder of the Mobile Innovation Network & Association (www.mina.pro) and Screening Director of the International Mobile Innovation Screening & Festival.

Max is an award-winning filmmaker with expertise in immersive media, documentary film and creative arts 4.0 with a focus on cinematic VR and interactive filmmaking. His research explores screen production, emerging media and smartphone filmmaking for community engagement, creative transformation and transmedia storytelling. 

His experimental films, moving-image arts and cinematic VR projects are screened at film festivals, in galleries and museums including FLEFF Film Festival (USA), Festival de La Imagen (Columbia), Museu da Imagem e do Som – Museum of Moving Image (Brazil), London Gallery West, South London Gallery (both UK), Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision - New Zealand Film Archive, Te Papa Tongarewa – Museum of New Zealand (both Aotearoa/New Zealand), Pocket Film Festival and Videoscope (both France). His mobile feature film Max with a Keitai (2007) is included in the public film archive in the Forum des Images in Paris (France) and the smartphone documentary feature Frankenstorm (2014) broadcasted on CTV, Canterbury Television (Aotearoa/New Zealand). 


Max co-edited the books Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones, Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones and Mobile Storytelling in an Age of Smartphones and edited journals for Studies in Documentary Film, Ubiquity, the Journal of Pervasive Media and the Journal of Creative Technologies. His monograph Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.   


He conceptualised and conducted digital storytelling workshops for a number of cultural institutes, city councils and government bodies in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. His industry consultancy includes projects for Adobe, Australian Red Cross, BBC, Nokia, Frontier Strategy, Open Lab and Telstra, among other agencies and production companies.