Professor Emeritus
Peabody Award-winning documentary producer, director, writer, and editor
Associate Professor Emerita
Dr. Ann Reisner is an Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, the Institute of Communications Research and an affiliate in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. Her primary research interests are in the areas of environmental communications and the sociology of the press. She is currently developing a monograph on using media research to develop policy at the individual, group and national levels and a separate text on the role of environmental film in mobilization. Her current teaching is in Communication and Environmental Social Movements, Media and Society and Watching the Environment.
Associate Professor
Director, Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
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.
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.
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies (ICR)
Derek Long is a historian of media industries, specializing in the Hollywood studio system, film distribution, and digital approaches to cinema history. His first book, Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2024), examines the history of film distribution as a dynamic struggle over booking, marketing, and sales practices in the 1910s and 1920s. His articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, The Velvet Light Trap, [in]Transition, among other journals and anthologies.
His work also applies digital datasets and tools to questions of media history. As a member of the Project Arclight team, he helped to map “trends” in media history to quantitatively assess the cultural influence of stars, films, studios, the trade press, and other institutions. As creator and manager of Early Cinema History Online (ECHO), a database based on the extensive work of film historians Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar Lundquist, he has indexed and compiled filmographic information covering over 35,000 individual films released in the United States from 1908–1920.
Here at the College of Media, he has taught MACS courses in world cinema, production, film theory, animation history, and graduate media historiography. His other research interests include animation, videographic criticism, early cinema, broadcasting history, avant-garde and cult cinema, and low-budget filmmaking.
Senior Lecturer
Dr. Heuman’s research explores media industries and regulation (especially television), with an emphasis on the regulation of media work. His different projects come together in a concern for the cultural life of media industries and their regulation (from content regulation as a style of cultural criticism to the gendered culture of television writers’ rooms), pursuing often neglected documents and discourses (from submissions to administrative and legal proceedings to how-to manuals for online investors and radio and television writers). His current projects follow the historical formation of the professional broadcast writer, from law and policy to contract and organization.
Dr. Heuman’s teaching ranges widely across the field of media studies, including courses in media industries; media law; media history; media theory; and media genre, narrative, and style.
Alongside these main lines of research and teaching, he’s also glad to think and talk about a broader range of interests across the field of media studies, and across the varied forms, genres, and periods of media.
Professor and Interim Head
My research concerns a wide variety of media and contexts—from popular media of the 20th century (cinema, television, telephony, radio) to “new media” and forms of “media convergence” to technologies and appliances that are not usually considered “media” (such as cars, buildings, clothes, garage doors, and refrigerators). The forms of analysis that I typically use are interdisciplinary, and informed by a wide variety of theories. Much of my research over the last fifteen years has occurred at the intersection of studies about citizenship and governmentality, media/space (with an interest in architecture, urbanism, design, and geography), Science Studies, and Cultural Studies. My research is oriented as much to past as to the present—as much to residual as to emergent media and their relation to everyday life. Although much of my research is about the U.S. context, some of my research concerns “global” media networks, and some has focused on Italy and Europe.
Senior Lecturer
Victor Font founded his own audiovisual company in the ’90s. He has been in the production business for more than 25 years. As principal of Prodimag his professional work has involved direction, production, postproduction, and services for worldwide production companies.
In 2004 he founded Intermedio, a cinema distribution company, releasing titles for retail and home DVD, including theatrical and rights for TV. Intermedio catalog includes over 200 movie titles and books, some of which have been locally and internationally awarded.
Victor Font was also involved in documentary production with the Series ISM and produced a documentary piece about Harold Bloom, both projects co-produced with Films Media Group (NY). Special mention to the documentary film Ich Bin Enric Marco, which was in the official selection of Las Palmas International festival (2009) and Locarno Festival (August 2009).
Professor
Cole is the co-editor of “Women, Sport & Culture” (with Susan Birrell) and “Sport and Corporate Nationalisms” (with Michael Silk and David Andrews). She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “Good Sports? The Boundaries of American Democracy.” She is the co-editor of the SUNY book series (with Michael Messner), “Sport, Culture & Social Relations,” and editor of the Journal of Sport & Social Issues. She serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Studies — Critical Methodologies, Qualitative Research in Sport & Exercise, and the NYU book series, “Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, & Health in the 21st Century.” She is the recipient of one of the University of Illinois’ Critical Research Initiative Awards and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Professor Cole was recently on sabbatical and worked with Chicago’s Beyondmedia Education, a non-profit, media-based social justice organization that works with underserved girls and women.
Associate Professor
Amanda Ciafone is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations. Her research and teaching is at the nexus of various fields including cultural history and cultural studies of the United States in the world, especially Latin America; political economy; culture and media industries; and social movements.
Professor Ciafone’s first book, Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California, 2019), examines The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation. Additional research and teaching materials can be found in the Scalar-produced multimedia digital companion to Counter-Cola.
She is currently at work on a new book project on the relationship between technology and old age, as part of the new, growing field of humanistic studies of aging.
Professor Ciafone co-edits the University of Illinois books series, The Geopolitics of Information, which publishes critical studies of global media and political economy.
