Associate Professor
Director, Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
Affiliations
- Department of Media & Cinema Studies
- Institute of Communications Research
- Department of Dance
- Department of French and Italian
- Informatics
Education
- 2017 | Ph.D. in Communication Arts (Film) | University of Wisconsin, Madison
- 2014 | C.M.A. (Certified Movement Analyst) | Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, New York City
- 2008 | B.A. in English | Carleton College
Course Specialties
- MACS 261: Survey of World Cinema I (1895–1945)
- MACS 262: Survey of World Cinema II (1945–present)
- MACS 350: Film Analysis and Criticism
- MACS 485: Making Video Essays
- MACS 504: Theories of Cinema
Background
My research explores the history of film style and craft, Franco-American cinema and its transnational intersections, the musical genre, movement and the body on screen, the relationship between dance and film history, methods for movement analysis, and videographic criticism. My first book, Storytelling in Motion: Cinematic Choreography and the Film Musical (OUP, 2024), demonstrates how filmmakers use choreography and figure movement to create meaning in their work. I am currently working on several ongoing long-form projects, including a second monograph on the films of Jacques Demy and a co-edited videographic book anthology on the musical. Other ongoing interests are the intersections between camera and figure movement and Japanese musicals’ performance conventions.
Research and Creative Endeavor
Selected publications:
Storytelling in Motion: Cinematic Choreography and the Film Musical. Oxford University Press (2024). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197602669.001.0001.
Materializing Musical Cinema: Videographic Approaches to Genre Study. Edited by Desirée J. Garcia and Jenny Oyallon-Koloski. Lever Press’s Videographic Books Series (forthcoming 2026).
“Thinking diegetically: Spatiotemporal principles and mimetic rhetorical functions in videographic criticism.” Academic Quarter 27: “Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities” (2024). 43–56. https://doi.org/10.54337/academicquarter.i27.8826 .
“Annotating FloLo: How the Media Ecology Project fostered early cinema performance analysis and collaborative research.” Journal of E-Media Studies. 7:1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.498.
“Moving Cinematic History: Filmic Analysis through Performative Research.” Primary author; co-authored with Michael J. Junokas, Dora Valkanova, Kayt MacMaster, and Sarah Marks Mininsohn. Digital Humanities Quarterly. 15:1 (2021). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000511/000511.html .
“Maya and Mia At La La Land.” Screenworks 10:1 (2019). http://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-10-1/maya-and-mia-at-la-la-land.
“America is (not) Cool.” [in]Transition Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 5:3 (2018). https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11454.
Amanda McQueen and Jenny Oyallon-Koloski. “Genre Hybridity and the Dansō No Reijin: The Musical In-Between-ness of Misora Hibari.” In Materializing Musical Cinema: Videographic Approaches to Genre Study. Desirée J. Garcia and Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, eds. Lever Press (forthcoming).
“American Delsartism, gestural meaning, and crafting genre performances in Florence Lawrence’s early Biograph films.” In Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema. Ian Christie et al, ed. Michigan, 2024. 388–408. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14468539.
“Danceploitation, musical disruption, and synergy in Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, and Breakin’.” In Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons. Martha Shearer and Julie Wright, ed. Bloomsbury, 2021. 15–27.
Creative collaborations:
2025. Mentor for the Videographic Workshop on Embedded Images, organized by Clémence Follea and Ariane Hudelet. Université Paris Cité, Paris, France. 10–11 October.
2025. Instructor for the Experimental Dance Film Summer Intensive, in collaboration with Laura Chiaramonte and Joshua Pridemore. Dance at Illinois, Champaign and Urbana, IL. 9–13 June.
