Our Team
Garen Daly has been in the dark for over 40 years, primarily in Boston and primarily watching movies. He comes from an entertainment family. His grandparents were vaudevillian opera singers. His career started as a cinema manager at the legendary Orson Welles Cinema. This later morphed into operator for several of Boston's better known art houses. Garen has appeared on a variety of media outlets including WGBH, ReelzTV and a bunch of others. He revived such places as the Somerville Theatre and the Dedham Community Theatre. He is an award winning programmer / consultant who continues to produce the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, the longest running genre festival in the US. Films are his drug of choice.
Violet graduated from Boston University in 2017 with a degree in Film and Television and a minor in Journalism. She has volunteered for several Boston area film festivals including: Boston Women's Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, and Independent Film Festival Boston. Her favorite science fiction movies include ARRIVAL, MINORITY REPORT, and HER. She is the previous Panels Producer for Boston SF46 and SF47.
Angela joined the team in 2019. Prior to Boston SciFi, Angela volunteered in the Screening Department of the Tribeca Film Festival. Her day job is in healthcare compliance, where she spends each day enforcing rigid rules, so she’s glad to be part of a space where creativity is allowed.
As an infant, Suzzanne enjoyed movies from the projection booth of an Air Force military base cinema with her mother and film projectionist dad. She continued to be raised on horror flicks, scifi conventions, and drive-ins, and experienced her first Boston SCIFI 'Thon in 1988. She has faithfully attended ever since. In 2008, Suzzanne and her husband co-founded the Lowell Film Collaborative, a grassroots film organization based in Lowell, MA, that works with non-profits, businesses, and community groups to present customized film events and screenings. The Boston SCIFI community is truly Suzzanne's second family.
Somerville native Ian Judge has been managing and programming the Somerville Theatre for 16 years; prior to that he served in the trenches at Loew's Theatres. He has a film degree from the once-affordable Keene State College.
Ezra Haber Glenn is a Lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning, where he teaches a special subject on “The City in Film” and coordinates the department's urban film series. His essays, criticism, and film reviews have appeared in the The Arts Fuse, WBUR’s The ARTery, Northeastern’s Experience magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, the New York Observer, Bloomberg’s CityLab, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and Next City, and he is the regular film reviewer for Planning, the monthly magazine of the American Planning Association. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Boston Online Film Critics Association.
Catarina hails from a small fishing village in Portugal, where nothing ever happens, and everyone knows everyone. She's addicted to Film and loves to escape her reality through writing.
She holds a Masters degree in Film/TV Exec. Production and Audiovisual Management, speaks three languages and has been travelling the world since she was 11. Her first step on set was at the age of 17 on a local TV Show where she worked and studied at the same time for nine months, and she hasn't stopped ever since.
Now she's known for her work as a scriptwriter, PA, AP, Script Supervisor and Runner for TV Series, Short Films and Reality TV in Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US.
An alumni of RIT, Jackie is a film producer and videographer. Especially passionate about costuming, Jackie has participated in countless events, including previous masquerade balls (Littleton Rotary Club). As costume assistant for The Umbrella Arts Center she helped with their award winning production of Ragtime. Jackie is excited to join the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival team as the Art Director for the Costume Ball.
A newbie to Boston as of 1997, Perry is a radio and union voiceover guy, with stops at WXRV (92.5 The River), WUML and WZLX. He’s been at WUMB-FM since 2011 doing on-air and audio production work. He made it to his first Boston SciFi Marathon in 2014. In 2016, Garen recruited him to help with the inaugural Group Sing as part of the pre-’Thon festivities. Perry’s been addicted ever since. And as February approaches, the smell of movie house popcorn gets him excited. He knows that Fest/’Thon time is near.
Her first marathon was SF3, at the Orson Welles in Cambridge, where she met my husband. She has come to most marathons since then. Her work life was divided into 2 very different areas: day care/preschool teaching, and applications and systems programming. Now that she’s retired, she have more time for watching and reading science fiction. And helping with preparing for SF48!
Claudia is new to Somerville from the San Francisco Bay Area. A first generation Mexican-American, she is a lover of sci-fi, horror and fantasy, particularly Guillermo Del Toro films. In her spare time she loves to explore, hike, and eat her way around New England. Her previous credits include The Mandalorian, Star Wars: Rebels, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Most recently she was 2nd AD on the Blumhouse film Soft & Quiet, which was shot in Marin County, California during the pandemic.
Mark grew up in Boston, or more specifically in Charlestown, and attended his first marathon when a friend from work brought him to SF14 in 1988. He loved the experience so much, he has attended every year since. Five or six years ago he became a shorts judge for the festival and has been helping to produce and direct the Sci Fi Podcast for the past two years. When not working for the Festival, he works for the Museum of Science, as he has for 37 years, 32 of those years in their I.T. department. Mark currently lives on a small pond in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and fifteen year old son.
Hailey is a long-time sci-fiction and film fan. She went so far as to make it her job, working in the film industry in Boston. She graduated with a degree in Media & Screen Studies from Northeastern University in 2021, and currently works as a Production Assistant on sets around Boston. She loves cameras, space, and dinosaurs. Her favorite pieces of science fiction are JURASSIC PARK, EUREKA, and THE MARTIAN.
Jay Michaels is a producer/executive with a specialty in communications and promotion. His career as an executive in charge of promotion and marketing began on Broadway with Guys & Dolls (1992). He served on the promotional staff for The Daily News and was a copywriter for Bob Hope at Carnegie Hall. In 1997, he opened a nonprofit arts & education organization: Genesis Repertory, founded with Mary Elizabeth Micari. He also fostered its promotional arm: JMC: Channel I – a network of programs featuring – and dedicated to – independent artists. Under the banner of JMC, he created visibility for more than 300 productions in New York City and led the promotional teams for several of NY’s leading theatre and film festivals. A noted genre film and television historian, Jay hosts numerous television programs including FearCon Terror-Vision, Terror Talk, Impressario, and In The PassionPit. He can also be found at conventions including Boston Sci-Fi, Phoenix FearCon, NY ComicCon, and Phantasm-Con. He is also a published writer and reviewer.
Harry is a long-time member of the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and Marathon production team. Harry serves in various committee roles, edits and produces the programs and other print material, and shoots and maintains Boston SciFi’s photographic archive. Harry is active with a number of non-profit organizations. He serves as an organizer and event photographer for Massachusetts Easter Seals Disability Services and chairs the board of trustees of Newton’s history museum operating jointly with the historical society as Historic Newton. Harry is a published writer, an avid traveler, a huge fan of Cape Cod and Boston, and a film, art, and music enthusiast.
Jen Bush is a licensed and certified speech therapist but a practitioner of the arts. Music and singing will always be her first passion. She has been fronting and playing instruments in rock and roll bands since 2002. She has been lucky enough to share the stage with members of bands like Twisted Sister, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Trans-Siberian Orchestra. In 2018 she traded clinical writing for arts writing when she began her position at Jay Michaels Communications: Channel i, a boutique promotion and production firm dedicated to giving visibility to independent artists. She has mother and son Chiweenies, a tuxedo cat and a Scotsman who shares her love of Science Fiction. She is over the moon to be working with The Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and Marathon.
Melissa Starker is a Boston native living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently manages PR and creative content for the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. For more than a decade, Starker shaped arts coverage for the alt weekly Columbus Alive, generating features on filmmakers including Roger Corman, David Cronenberg, and George Romero. Starker later freelanced for outlets including The Columbus Dispatch and The Guardian UK. Starker also has more than 30 years of experience in film presentation. She founded and programmed the Alive Deep Focus Film Festival from 2006 to 2008, and she spends some of her off time these days organizing and curating screenings at venues around central Ohio.