Terri Francis is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts. Dr. Francis brings twenty years of experience in film exhibition to her role. In Miami, she plans to create events and discussions that explore archives and the moving image based on her explorations of global black film history.
Dr. Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism published by Indiana University Press in 2021. A scholar of Black film history and aesthetics, her writing and curating engages film archives, film feelings, and the vicissitudes of performance and representation within a global perspective. Currently, her introduction to “Josephine Baker, Queen of Paris” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Dr. Francis has published her research on Jamaican nontheatrical films as “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961” in Film History. In 2013, she guest-edited a special section on Afrosurrealism in the journal Black Camera. Her critical essays appear in Transition, Another Gaze, and Salon.com, and she has provided film commentary for National Public Radio.
During her tenure as Director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University Dr. Francis secured the acquisition of the papers of African film pioneer Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. She engaged the BFC/A’s varied publics through multiple curated film series, including Race Swap, Black Sun/White Moon, and Love! I’m in Love! She initiated the speaker series Black Film Nontheatrical, which featured visiting archivists and their collections, and Before Representation in which scholars discussed the racial underpinnings of media formations. With her leadership, the BFC/A instituted a program of visiting research fellows as well as a program of visiting curators to explore the BFC/A’s holdings. The BFC/A’s guest roster includes several prominent scholars and filmmakers, including Allyson Field, Numa Perrier, Kevin Jerome Everson, Crystal Z. Campbell, Cheryl Dunye, Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich, Michael Gillespie, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Blitz Bazawule, all of whom were brought to campus through vibrant collaborations with ARRAY, the IU Cinema, #DirectedbyWomen, and the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.
In collaboration with the Grunwald Gallery, Dr. Francis co-published Rough and Unequal: A film by Kevin Jerome Everson (2021) a reflective exhibition catalog in dialogue with the 2019 16mm exhibition she co-curated with Betsy Stirratt at the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
More information on Dr. Francis’s work is available at TerriFrancis.com