Urgent Media and Nontheatrical Ecologies: Jamaican Filmmaker Esther Figueroa in Conversation

Terri Francis teaches film studies courses and directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University. She is a scholar of Black film and critical race theory whose work involves archival research, cultural history, and visual analysis, set within the vicissitudes of performance and representation. Francis published her research on Jamaican nontheatrical films as “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951–1961” in Film History in 2011, and she guest edited a close-up on Afrosurrealism for Black Camera in 2013. Francis is the author of Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism (Indiana University Press, forthcoming in February 2021), and her essays appear in Transition and Another Gaze. Francis has worked to animate the Black Film Center/Archive as a living, breathing center of new and unexpected ideas about Black film. She has curated the film series “Race Swap,” “Black Sun/White Moon,” and “Love! I'm in Love!” and the speaker series “Black Film: Nontheatrical” and “Before Representation.”