SCHOLARLY RESEARCH

"Festivals create and expand taste, cinematic sensibilities, and ways of storytelling as a

way to dynamically make and remake our aesthetic, social, and cultural

values through the stories brought to screen about who we are, where we

came from, and what we want."

"Curatorial practices around film, video, and new media technology carry the potential to repossess and radicalize the heart of cinema." The Scholar & Feminist Online

"Festivals are portals that expand the limits of our film culture. Filmmakers of color bring more than film prints with them to festivals; they bring networks and affiliations — of directors, writers, producers, and actors — that literally grow to occupy space in the theaters and thus create contexts for different ways of looking through their very physical presence." 

Camera Obscura

In Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation in Recent Art, Whitney Museum ISP Exhibition Catalogue. New Haven:

Yale University Press.

 "Festival curatorial practices can challenge exclusionary formations of film culture – and prompt an urgent reconceptualization of to whom it belongs, who lays claim to it, to whom

it speaks and who talks back." 

Screen Journal 

 Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Mediamaking (1986 - 2011), Eds. Yvonne Welbon and Alex Juhasz (Duke University Press).

Tabitha Jackson articulates the urgent distinction between journalism and documentary, Don Young discusses the emerging “industry of documentary” and its dangers, and Hussain Currimbhoy considers how VR is radically transforming documentary spectatorship.  World Records Journal

"The virus clarifies our interdependence on each other. My survival depends upon your survival.  We have an opportunity to transform politics and the future of our democracy. Our country deserves leadership that is authentically of the people, by the people — and for the people."  Refinery 29, April 2020

"What happens to our film culture when so many film critics grossly misread the cinematic choices and approaches of female directors?" The Nation

"Is the Academy so overcome by the limitations of its own perspective that it has become blind to the craft manifest in other kinds of storytelling?" 

Feminist Wire

"From their beginnings in Europe as showcases for national cinemas between the world wars to their global proliferation over the past 30 years, film festivals have played a significant role in actively defining, shaping, and bringing together communities."

Reviews of The Stuart Hall Project, dir. John Akomfrah, American Revolutionary, dir. Grace Lee, and Brothers Hypnotic, dir. Reuben Atlas  "These documentaries challenge conventions of biography and expectations of authenticity in order to create more expansive contexts for how the lives of people of color are read on-screen." 

American Quarterly

"The greatest cultural dilemma of our time is how to train American society to unlearn a fear of Black people that has been cultivated and evolved through cinematic storytelling." NBC Black

"Whiteness is not a privilege, it is a birthright, an entitlement. And it needed a hero...Being Republican has become an aspirational brand." 

The Huffington Post

"Technology made us a false promise. We were promised a feeling of connection. But Facebook and Instagram are deliberately designed to fail. We obsessively check our feeds precisely because our online interactions — the likes and the hearts and the comments — never satiate our desire for connection."  Medium

“12 Years” is a portrait of racism as pathology. Racism is not about right or wrong, it cannot be turned on and off. Pathology seizes the body, infects the way we see, and bleeds into the ways we experience the world." 

IndieWire

"Today’s Black independent film  movement reminds us of the political possibilities of cinema, even today, when we are bombarded by damaging media at every turn." 

The Huffington Post

"As the apotheosis of the Iranian diasporic imagination, CIRCUMSTANCE is more likely to reveal the desires and personal truths of its creator, cast, and crew than to expose dark secrets of the Orient for the pleasure of Western viewers." 

The Huffington Post

"Science fiction films aren't all starring white heroes obsessed with an all-powerful conquest to stamp out invading forces threatening the glory of Western civilization."  

ColorLines

"The catastrophe of misogyny is foremost the loss of our collective sense of humanity - our ability to see ourselves reflected in each other." The Huffington Post