Biography

Terri Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (Indiana University Press, 2021). She is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Director of the Black Film Center/Archive in the Media School at Indiana University. Francis’s work centers on innovators and adventurers in film during the early 20th century and the early 21st century. Her publications in Film History, Black Camera, Transition, Feminist Media Histories, and Film Quarterly draw on archival research, interviews, cultural history, and visual analysis, as she examines the vicissitudes of black performance and black representation. In addition to providing commentary for Salon and NPR, she has curated the film series Race Swap, Black Sun/White Moon, and Love! I’m in Love! Classic Black Cinema of the 1970s at IU Cinema and hosted several Jorgensen Guest Filmmakers, including Julie Dash, Ja’Tovia Gary, Stefani Saintonge, and Cheryl Dunye. In 2019 with Betsy Stirratt, Director of the Grunwald Gallery, she co-curated Rough and Unequal: A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson and in 2020 they published a catalog of essays, conversations and photographs in dialogue with and expanding on the exhibition. Francis’s upcoming projects delve into Afrosurrealism and other forms of avant-garde expression.

Publications 

• Urgent Media and Nontheatrical Ecologies: Jamaican Filmmaker Esther Figueroa in Conversation, Feminist Media Histories, 2020.
• Thinking Through Camille Billops, Another Gaze, 2019.
• Structural Laughter and Constructed Intimacies, Film Quarterly, 2018.
• “Unexpected Archives: More Locations of Caribbean Film,” sx salon, 2014.
• Afrosurrealism for Black Camera, 2013.
• “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951–1961” in Film History, 2011.

Film Series

• Love! I’m in Love!: Classic Black Films of the 1970s, 2020.
• Once Haunted and Once Haunted Still, 2019.
• Rough and Unequal: Film Installation by Kevin Jerome Everson, 2019.
• Black Sun/White Moon: Exploring Black Cinematic Imaginations of Outer Space, 2019.
• Young, Gifted and Black: Michael Schultz Celebrates, 50 Years on Stage and Screen, 2018.
• Race Swap, 2018

Media Appearances

• TEDxIndiana University: Thinking Through Race, 2019.
• Interchange: Centering Black Film from Spike Lee to Josephine Baker, 2019.
• Through the Gates: Terri Francis, Director of IU’s Black Film Center/Archive, 2018.