ICM LECTURE SERIES
SPRING 2026
SAMANTHA N. SHEPPARD (Associate Professor, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University)
“A Black W/hole: Tisa Bryant's Phantom Cinemas”
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45pm- 6:15pm.
Free and open to the public
Abstract
In this talk I explore how writer and visual artist Tisa Bryant’s The Curator exemplifies what I theorize as phantom cinema: a Black feminist mode of cinematic thought and cultural production that intervenes in film history not by recovering lost films but by speculatively inhabiting the conditions of their absence. Reading The Curator alongside Bryant’s broader literary and cinematic practice, I show how phantom cinemas operate as both historiographic method and aesthetic strategy—one that renders gaps in Black women’s film history newly perceptible while resisting the archival logics that demand verification, completeness, or visual proof.
Bio
Samantha N. Sheppard is Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Prof. Sheppard's research interests include Black cultural production and production cultures, African American representation in cinema, television studies, sports films, feminist media studies, embodiment studies, and critical race theory. She writes extensively on issues of race, gender, and representation in film, television, and digital media. She teaches courses on global cinema, sports films, contemporary television, African American film history, popular culture, women filmmakers, and blackness on screen.
