Connected to the music video project, this masterclass focuses on Gallery Sessions, a project developed by the production company Whitehorse. Pol González breaks down its creative and production approach, exploring how live music formats can be translated into strong audiovisual experiences.

Pol González is a creative director and audiovisual producer specialized in music-related content. He combines strategic thinking with a deep understanding of format, audience and digital platforms.

Backstories

Kathy Ryan will choose a handful of photographs that stand out in her mind from the pages of The New York Times Magazine during the 39 years she worked there. She will share the backstory for each picture to give insight into how that image came into being. The photographs will cover a wide range of subject matter including international news, lifestyle stories, and culture coverage.

Ryan will also show and talk about some of the photographs from her Office Romance series that she made during the last decade she worked at The NYTMAG. They are a love poem to her colleagues and a celebration of the radiant light in the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building.

The longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, Kathy Ryan has been a pioneer of combining fine art photography with photojournalism. She has worked with the world’s best photographers across all genres of photography. She regularly brought new talent into The Magazine’s pages. She left The Times after 39 years to focus on her own artwork, curating exhibitions, teaching a course at Yale, and speaking engagements.

In 2011, Ryan edited The New York Times Magazine Photographs, a landmark book published by Aperture. An accompanying exhibition, curated by Ryan and Lesley Martin opened at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2012, traveled to FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, Palau Robert in Barcelona, Universidad Católica in Santiago and ended its run at the Aperture Gallery in New York City.

Ryan has contributed essays and Q&A’s to books by photographers Lee Friedlander, Christopher Payne, Seydou Keïta, Paolo Pellegrin, Lynsey Addario, Jack Davison and Brian Finke. She was the picture editor of Feeling the Spirit by Chester Higgins.

The Magazine‘s photography and videos have been recognized with numerous awards. Ryan was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize from the German Photographic Society in September 2025. Ryan was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2007; the Royal Photographic Society’s annual award for Outstanding Service to Photography in 2012; the Vision Award at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2014; and the Outstanding Contribution to Photography recognition from Creative Review in 2016. Ryan has been recognized as Photo Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards and Visa Pour l’Image. Ryan won two Emmy’s for videos she produced for The New York Times Magazine’s Great Performers series. Kathy was the International Center of Photography’s Spotlight honoree in 2024.

Office Romance, a book of Ryan’s photographs featuring her colleagues and the beauty and poetry to be found in the radiant light in the New York Times building was published by Aperture in 2014. This work has been exhibited in Europe and the U.S. All of Ryan’s photography is done with the iPhone.

Linked to the final project, this masterclass offers a producer’s perspective on contemporary cinema. Through key projects such as Robot Dreams and As Bestas, Sandra Tàpia shares insights into supporting creative vision and managing production challenges.

Sandra Tàpia is a film producer with a strong trajectory in independent and international cinema. She has produced award-winning films and works closely with directors throughout all stages of production.

This masterclass explores cinema from an authorial perspective. Using Creatura as a central case study, Elena Martín reflects on writing, directing and performing within the same project, and on building intimate and personal narratives.

Elena Martín is a filmmaker, screenwriter and actress whose work explores intimacy, identity and emotional complexity. Her films have received international recognition.

The aim of this seminar is to offer students a perspective on visual narrative discourse from the Middle Ages through the reading of walls, textiles, and graffiti produced in the medieval world between the 6th and the 15th centuries. These works can today be understood as narrative murals, and even as comics avant la lettre. This approach will allow us to build a long-term historical perspective, establish analogies with contemporary graphic storytelling, and generate inspiration for the development and execution of mural creations using today’s graphic languages.

The seminar Narrative Murals will serve as the theoretical basis for carrying out a collective mural paste-up project that will be produced and exhibited within the framework of the Ilustra Madrid Festival during April and May 2026.

Seminar promoted by the Cátedra de Recerca i Experimentació en Cómic Finestres-Elisava.

Almudena Blasco is a Professor of Medieval Visual Culture. She has been a researcher at the EHESS in Paris and at the CSIC Institute of History, and a Fellow at Harvard (Villa I Tatti, Florence), as well as a professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris. Former director of the journal Medievalia, she has curated numerous exhibitions and works as an art critic in various media outlets.

This masterclass reviews Artur Tort’s main works in fiction cinema, focusing on how light, framing and camera movement shape narrative and emotional atmosphere.

Artur Tort is a cinematographer with extensive experience in film and documentary. His work is characterized by an expressive use of light and close collaboration with directors.

This masterclass revisits Clara Roquet’s key works in contemporary cinema, focusing on screenwriting processes, character construction and emotional truth.

Clara Roquet is a screenwriter and director whose work explores relationships, identity and emotional nuance, and has received international recognition

Love me one time, two times … x times !

The lecture is not a conventional showcase of selected projects from our daily practice, but rather aims to provide a broader insight into the network of actors in which b+ (bplus.xyz) operates, how we understand the contemporary way of an architectural practice and scope of work of an architect, and how we approach our projects—in short: who b+ is and how we work, what our values are, and what our understanding of our duties and responsibilities as architects is.

Jonas Janke (DE, 1991) is an architect and partner at bplus.xyz (Berlin). He has a diverse background in architecture, was trained as an architectural draughtsman before pursuing his studies in Hamburg, Stockholm, and Berlin. He gained valuable experience as a tutor and assistant in various departments including design & typologies, building construction, and structural design. He was part of the team 2038, the German Pavilion at 17th Venice Architecture Biennale 2021.

His early teaching experiences include guest studios at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He is regularly invited to give lectures and guest critiques at universities, cultural institutions, and public institutions. His focus is on new ecological construction materials and methods for adaptive reuse and renovation projects, seeking pragmatic and efficient technical and mechanical solutions that use material and construction thoughtfully.

bplus.xyz (b+) is a collaborative architecture practice (led by Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Jonas Janke and Roberta Jurčić) that operates at the intersection of theory and practice, using different media and formats. The practice seeks to engage with the contemporary challenges of our time, particularly those related to the social-ecological transformation of existing buildings, offering economically viable solutions.

b+ understands architecture as an open process, and views buildings as part of larger systems that require a systemic approach. The practice sees the given framework of existing buildings and legislation as an active design tool with the potential for transformation. Thus, b+ celebrates the potential of the existing built environment and aims to reveal and activate the latent potentials within.

b+ emphasizes working with different actors and stakeholders in project development. The practice values their knowledge and expertise and aims to create spaces for exchange and collaboration. b+ seeks to advance a new value system in architecture, one that places greater emphasis on collective responsibility, systemic thinking, and ecologically and economically viable solutions.

The current project in the field of political activism is the European citizens’ initiative HouseEurope! – HouseEurope! wants to create incentives that make renovation the new norm. This will boost the renovation market and give new value to what is already there. The goal is to preserve homes and communities, ensure a fairer and more local building industry, save energy and resources, and preserve our memories and stories.