Jacqueline Stewart

Jacqueline Stewart’s research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, silent cinema, film spectatorship and exhibition, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories –including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video.

Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project, a community-centered archival program housed at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life that will celebrate its 20th year in 2025.  She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, and former director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.  She is host of “Silent Sunday Nights” on Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, which has achieved recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is co-curator, with Jan-Christopher Horak and Allyson Nadia Field, of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which generated new restorations of landmark films by the “L.A. Rebellion” group of Black independent filmmakers, as well as the edited volume L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, a symposium, a DVD package and retrospective that toured nationally and internationally.  She is co-editor, with Scott MacDonald, of and William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission. In 2015, she co-curated, with Charles Musser, the five-disc set Pioneers of African American Cinema for Kino Lorber. 

Stewart is the recipient of numerous honors including a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. 

*Editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

Previously taught courses include: Black Film as Art / Black Art as Film (CMST 61001), Advanced Seminar (CMST 29200), Senior Colloquium (CMST 29800), African American Cinema Since 1970 (CMST 21020 / 31020), Birth of a Nation (CMST 61101)