Science fiction is a film genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar travel, time travel, or other technologies. Science fiction films have often been used to focus on political or social issues, and to explore philosophical issues like the human condition.
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
Rachel Kay Foulger, known professionally as Rachel Ames, is an American film and television actress.
The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, is one of the 12 schools within the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) located in Los Angeles, California. Its creation was groundbreaking in that it was the first time a leading university had combined all three of these aspects into a single administration. The undergraduate program is often ranked among the world's top drama departments. The graduate programs are usually ranking within the top three nationally, according to the U.S. News & World Report. Among the school's resources are the Geffen Playhouse and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the world's largest university-based archive of its kind, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2015. The Archive constitutes one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States — second only to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Its vaults hold more than 220,000 motion picture and television titles and 27 million feet of newsreel footage. The film, television, and digital media program is one of the most prestigious film programs in the world. It is the most selective film school as the film and television major selects about only 15 freshman out of thousands of applicants and a handful of transfer students.
Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass communication research, which tends to approach the topic from a social sciences perspective. Defining the field is problematic; some institutions and syllabuses do not distinguish it from media studies or classify it as a subfield of popular culture studies.
John Kenneth Muir is an American literary critic. As of 2022, he has written thirty reference books in the fields of film and television, with a particular focus on the horror and science fiction genres.
Film Quarterly, a journal devoted to the study of film, television, and visual media, is published by University of California Press. It publishes scholarly analyses of international and Hollywood cinema as well as independent film, including documentary and animation. The journal also revisits film classics; examines television and digital and online media; reports from international film festivals; reviews recent academic publications; and on occasion addresses installations, video games and emergent technologies. It welcomes established scholars as well as emergent voices that bring new perspectives to bear on visual representation as rooted in issues of diversity, race, lived experience, gender, sexuality, and transnational histories. Film Quarterly brings timely critical and intersectional approaches to criticism and analyses of visual culture.
Frederick Luis Aldama is an American academic, known for this work as the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab, and Affiliate Faculty in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, and Adjunct Professor & Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He teaches courses on Latinx comics, tv, and film in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film. At the Ohio State University he was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher as well as recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. At the Ohio State University he was founder and director of the award-winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research and founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. Aldama is the creator and curator of the Planetary Republic of Comics.
Frank P. Tomasulo is an American film critic, theoretician, and historian. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Brooklyn College, his M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and his Ph.D. in film and television from UCLA. He served as editor of the Journal of Film and Video from 1991 to 1996 and Cinema Journal from 1997 to 2002.
Suzanne Lummis is a poet, influential teacher, arts organizer and impresario in Los Angeles. She is associated with the poem noir, as well as the sensibility for which she was a major exponent–a literary incarnation of performance poetry–the Stand-up Poetry of the 80s and 90s. She is also grouped with “The Fresno Poets.”
Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.
Caroline Joan S. Picart is a Filipino-born American academic who has written and edited numerous books and anthologies on philosophy and cultural studies, especially horror film. She is also a lawyer and had a radio show, The Dr. Caroline (Kay) Picart Show. In 2011, she received the Lord Ruthven Award, non-fiction category, for the book Dracula in Visual Media Film, Television, Comic Book and Electronic Game Appearances, 1921-2010, co-authored with John Edgar Browning.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Teshome H. Gabriel was an Ethiopian-born American cinema scholar and professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in Los Angeles. Gabriel was considered an expert on cinema and film of Africa and the developing world. A colleague at UCLA, Vinay Lal, noted that Gabriel was "one of the first scholars to theorize in a critical fashion about Third World cinema."
Gina Kim is a filmmaker and academic. Kim's five feature-length films and short films have garnered acclaim through screenings at most major film festivals and at venues such as the MOMA, Centre Pompidou and the Smithsonian. According to Film Comment, Kim has "a terrific eye, a gift for near-wordless storytelling, a knack for generating a tense gliding rhythm between images and sounds, shots and scenes, and for yielding a quality of radiance in her actors". Between 2004–2007 and 2013–2014, Kim taught film production and theory classes at Harvard University, being the first Asian woman teaching in her department. Kim was also a member of the Jury for the 66th Venice Film Festival and the Asian Pacific Screen Awards in 2009. Currently, Kim is a professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television.
Zeinabu irene Davis is an American filmmaker and professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her works in film include narrative, documentary and experimental film.
Felicia D. Henderson is an American television producer, screenwriter, comic books writer and a director of music videos and television episodes. She has worked on Moesha, Sister, Sister, Soul Food, and Fringe, also played in a movie with Whitney Houston.
Jan Millsapps is a U.S. digital filmmaker, fiction writer, and Professor Emerita in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. She has produced films, videos and interactive cinema on subjects ranging from domestic violence to global terrorism, and has published in traditional print and online venues.
E. Ann Kaplan is an American professor, author, and director. She currently teaches English at the Stony Brook State University of New York, and is the founder and director of The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. She coined the term "“Future-Tense Trauma Cinema” for a select group of films, a sub-set of the Science Fiction film, that focus on human and natural causes of complete social collapse instead of, as in standard Sci-Fi, displacing cultural anxieties into allegories of aliens invading planet Earth from elsewhere."" She is also one of the precursors of the Madonna studies.
Giuliana Bruno is a scholar of visual art and media. She is currently the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known as the author of numerous influential books and articles on art, architecture, film, and visual culture.
