Adelheid Heftberger is a slavicist and film scholar, and currently holds the position of head of access in the film department of the German Federal Archive (Berlin). Previously she held positions at the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (Potsdam) and the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna) as researcher, curator and archivist. Her main areas of expertise include Digital Humanities, Film Cultural Heritage and Russian/Soviet Film. She is the author of the book Kollision der Kader. Dziga Vertovs Filme, die Visualisierung ihrer Strukturen und die Digital Humanities and has published on Russian cinema, archival collections and visualization of filmic structures.

Ruth Bieri is a freelance pianist, keyboard player and composer based in Zürich, Switzerland. For over 30 years, she has been heavily involved in music projects. She has played and continues to play in diverse formations at home and abroad as well as composing for film and theatre. In 1993, she founded Serpent (known today as Women in Music) in Zürich – the first ever rock, pop and jazz academy for women in the DACH countries – where Bieri provided vital impulses in her ten-year tenure as an instructor and academy director. The common thread running through her musical career is her passion for combining music with images or language. Her extraordinary gift for spontaneously inventing and varying musical themes finds expression in her work as a live accompanist for silent films.