Background
Joel Neville Anderson is a scholar and curator of cinema and media with a focus on experimental documentary, community media, digital culture, and environmental and disability justice. Anderson鈥檚 current projects include co-authoring a book on Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko鈥檚 filmmaking partnership, witnessing alongside political movements, and a monograph on forces shaping people鈥檚 documentation of everyday environments and artists and amateurs creating alternatives to extractive images.
His writing appears in Studies in Documentary Film, Millennium Film Journal, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Senses of Cinema, Film on the Faultline, and the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema. He served as managing editor and editorial board member of InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, and co-produced The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies podcast.
He programmed JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film, the largest festival of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America, where he worked for more than a decade; as a professor, he was recognized with a Student Engagement Award for creating a faculty- and student-curated weekly campus screening series. He is an invited speaker at universities and academic conferences, including Visible Evidence and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and has served as an educator at media arts nonprofits, including the Downtown Community Television Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Jacob Burns Film Center.
Before arriving at 91社区, he held academic appointments at Ithaca College and The New School. He earned a PhD and MA in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and a BFA in Film from Purchase College, State University of New York. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies, the Flaherty Seminar, and Signal Culture.
Education
- PhD and MA in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
- BFA in Film, Purchase College, State University of New York
Research Interests
- Visual and cultural studies
- Self-documentary and community media
- Environmental and disability justice
- Digital culture and platforms
- Neoliberalism and decolonization
Teaching Interests
- Cinema and media history and theory, narrative and genre
- Documentary and experimental film/video
- Environmental media and ecology
- Film festival studies and programming practices
- East Asian cinemas and and diasporic media